IIS UNIVERSTIY (Deemed to be )

Department of ENGLISH
Project 103
Topic = Analysis of “The road not taken”
Submitted by Submitted to
Sushmita Jangid Priyanka Prim
Senior assistant professor
Enroll no. 32915
BA.BED
 INDEX

S NO. TOPIC PAGE NO.

1. ABOUT THE AUTHOR. 3-4
2. BACKGROUND OF THE 4-5
ERA.
3. SYNOPSIS OF POEM. 6-7
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, where his father, William Prescott
Frost Jr., and his mother, Isabelle, had moved from Pennsylvania shortly after marrying. After
the death of his father from tuberculosis when Frost was eleven years old, he moved with his
mother and sister, Jeanie, who was two years younger, to Lawrence, Massachusetts. He became
interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, enrolled at
Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1892, and later at Harvard University in
Boston, though he never earned a formal college degree.

Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler,
and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first published poem, "My Butterfly," appeared on
November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaper THE INDEPENT.

In 1895, Frost married Miriam White, whom he'd shared valedictorian honors with in high
school and who was a major inspiration for his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved
to England in 1912, after they tried and failed at farming in New Hampshire. It was abroad that
Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert
Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet
Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work.

By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length
collections, A Boy's Will (Henry Holt and Company, 1913) and North of Boston (Henry Holt
and Company, 1914), and his reputation was established. By the 1920s, he was the most
celebrated poet in America, and with each new book including New Hampshire (Henry Holt and
Company, 1923), A Further Range (Henry Holt and Company, 1936), Steeple Bush (Henry Holt
and Company, 1947), and In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962) his fame and honors,
including four Pulitzer Prizes, increased. Frost served as consultant in poetry to the Library of
Congress from 1958 to 1959. In 1962, he was presented the Congressional Gold Medal.

Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England and
though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from
the poetic movements and fashions of his time Frost is anything but merely a regional poet. The
author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially
modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological
complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of
ambiguity and irony.
In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poet Daniel Hoffman describes Frost's early
work as "the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources of
its own delight in the world," and comments on Frost's career as the "American Bard": "He
became a national celebrity, our nearly official poet laureate, and a great performer in the
tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain."

President John F. Kennedy, at whose inauguration Frost delivered a poem, said of the poet, "He
has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain
joy and understanding." And famously, "He saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself.
When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power
narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his
existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston
on January 29, 1963.
 BACKGROUND OF THE ERA
Frost was born in San Francisco, where he spent his first eleven years. After the death of his
father, a journalist, he moved with his mother and sister to eastern Massachusetts near his
paternal grandparents. He wrote his first poems while a student at Lawrence High School, from
which he graduated as co-valedictorian with the woman he was to marry, Miriam White. He
entered Dartmouth College in the fall of 1892 but stayed for less than a term, returning home to
teach school and to work at various jobs, including factory-hand and newspaperman. In 1894 he
sold his first poem, 'My Butterfly: An Elegy', to a New York magazine, The Independent. That
same year, unable to persuade to marry him (she wanted to finish college first), he headed south
on a reckless journey into Virginia's Dismal Swamp. After emerging unscathed he came home to
Lawrence where he and were married in December 1895.

Both husband and wife taught school for a time, then in 1897 Frost entered Harvard College as a
special student, remaining there just short of two years. He performed well at Harvard, but his
health was uncertain and he rejoined his wife in Lawrence, where she was about to bear a second
child. In October of 1900 he settled with his family on a farm just over the Massachusetts line in
New Hampshire, purchased for him by his grandfather. There, over the next nine years, he wrote
many of the poems that would make up his first published volumes. But his attempt at poultry
farming was none too successful, and by 1906 he had begun teaching English at Pinkerton
Academy, a secondary school in New Hampshire. That same year two of his most accomplished
early poems, 'The Tuft of Flowers' and 'The Trial by Existence', were published. Meanwhile he
and Miriam produced six children, two of whom died in infancy. After a year spent teaching at
the State Normal School in Plymouth, New Hampshire, he sold the Derry farm and in the fall of
1912 sailed with his family from Boston to Glasgow, then settled outside London in
Beaconsfield.

Within two months of his arrival in England, Frost placed his first book of poems, A Boy's Will
(1913) with a small London publisher, David Nutt. He also made acquaintances in the literary
world, such as the poet F. S. Flint, who introduced him to Ezra Pound, who in turn reviewed both
A Boy's Will and North of Boston, which followed it the next year. He became friends with
members of the Georgian school of poets particularly with Wilfred Gibson and Abercrombie and
in 1914, on their urgings, he moved to Gloucestershire to be nearer them and to experience
English country living. The most important friend he made in England was Edward Thomas,
whom Frost encouraged to poetry and who wrote sharply intelligent reviews of Frost's first two
books. While many reviewers were content to speak of the American poet's 'simplicity' and
artlessness, Thomas recognized the originality and success of Frost's experiments with the
cadences of vernacular speech--with what Frost called 'the sound of sense'. His best early poems,
such as 'Mown,' ‘Mending Wall,' and ‘Home Burial,' were composed under the assumption that,
in Frost's formulation from one of his letters, 'the ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and
the only true reader.’ The best part of a poet's work, he insisted, was to be found in the sentence-
sounds poems made, as of people talking. Like Wordsworth (as Edward Thomas pointed out in
one of his reviews of North of Boston), Frost boldly employed 'ordinary' words and cadences ('I
have sunk to a diction even Wordsworth kept above', he said in another letter) yet contrived to
throw over them in Wordsworth's formulation from his preface to the Lyrical Ballads' of
imagination '.England's entry into the First World War hastened Frost's return to America early
in 1915. By the time he landed in New York City, his American publisher, Henry Holt, had
brought out North of Boston (Holt would continue to publish Frost throughout his life). He was
fêted by editors and critics in the literary worlds of both New York and Boston, and he continued
shrewdly to publicize himself, providing anthologists and interviewers with a vocabulary to
describe his poetic aims. A third volume of verse, Mountain Interval, published in 1916 but still
drawing on poems he had written in England and before, showed no falling off from his previous
standard. In fact such poems as 'The Road Not Taken,’ ‘An Old Man's Winter Night,' 'The Oven
Bird,’ ‘Birches,’ ‘Putting in the Seed,' and 'Out, Out ‘were among the best he had written or was
to write. Like the somewhat late-coming and even drab oven bird of his poem, Frost knew in
'singing not to sing,’ and a century after the ecstatic flights of romantic poets like Keats and
Shelley, Frost's bird remained earthbound (the oven bird, in fact, builds its nests on the ground)
and, like the poet who created him, sang about the things of this world.

Soon after he re-established himself in America, Frost purchased a farm in Franconia, New
Hampshire (he would purchase a number of farms over the course of his life) and then, at the
behest of President Alexander john, joined the faculty of Amherst College in Massachusetts.
Frost was later to teach at the University of Michigan and at Dartmouth College, but his
relationship to Amherst (sometimes a troubled one) was the most significant educational alliance
he formed. Meanwhile he had begun the practice of reading his poems aloud-- rather, 'saying’
them, as he liked to put it public gatherings. These occasions, which continued throughout his
life, were often intensive ones in which he would read, comment on, and reflect largely about his
poems and about the world in general. Particularly at colleges and universities he commanded
the ears and often hearts of generations of students, and he received so many honorary degrees
from the academy that he eventually had the hoods made into a quilt.

Frost won the first of four Pulitzer Prizes in 1924 for his fourth book, New Hampshire, and
followed it with West-Running Brook (1928) and A Further Range (1936), which also won a
Pulitzer.
 SYNOPSIS OF POEM
The speaker, walking through a forest whose leaves have turned yellow in autumn, comes to a
fork in the road. The speaker, regretting that he or she is unable to travel by both roads (since he
or she is, after all, just one person), stands at the fork in the road for a long time and tries to see
where one of the paths leads. However, the speaker can't see very far because the forest is dense
and the road is not straight. The speaker takes the other path, judging it to be just as good a
choice as the first, and supposing that it may even be the better option of the two, since it is
grassy and looks less worn than the other path. Though, now that the speaker has actually walked
on the second road, he or she thinks that in reality the two roads must have been more or less
equally worn-in. Reinforcing this statement, the speaker recalls that both roads were covered in
leaves, which had not yet been turned black by foot traffic. The speaker exclaims that he or she is
in fact just saving the first road, and will travel it at a later date, but then immediately contradicts
him or herself with the acknowledgement that, in life, one road tends to lead onward to another,
so it's therefore unlikely that he or she will ever actually get a chance to return to that first road.

The speaker imagines him or herself in the distant future, recounting, with a sigh, the story of
making the choice of which road to take. Speaking as though looking back on his or her life from
the future, the speaker states that he or she was faced with a choice between two roads and chose
to take the road that was less traveled, and the consequences of that decision have made all the
difference in his or her life. In "The Road Not Taken," the speaker describes him or herself as
facing a choice between which of two roads to take. The speaker's choice functions as an
extended metaphor for all the choices that the speaker and all people must make in life. Through
the speaker's experience, the poem explores the nature of choices, and what it means to be a
person forced to choose (as all people inevitably are).The poem begins with the speaker
recounting the experience of facing the choice of which road to take. The speaker's first emotion
is "sorrow," as he or she regrets the reality that makes it impossible to "travel both" roads, or to
experience both things. The poem makes clear that every choice involves the loss of opportunity
and that choice are painful because they must be made with incomplete information. The speaker
tries to gather as much information as possible by looking "down one [road] as far as I could,"
but there is a limit to what the speaker can see, as the road is "bent," meaning that it curves,
leaving the rest of it out of sight. So the speaker, like anyone faced with a choice, must make a
choice, but can't know enough to be sure which choice is the right one. The speaker, as a result,
is paralyzed: "long I stood" contemplating which road to choose.

The speaker does eventually choose a road based on which one appears to have been less
traveled, but the poem shows that making that choice doesn't actually solve the speaker's
problem. Immediately after choosing a road, the speaker admits that the two roads were "worn...
really about the same" and that both roads "equally lay" without any leaves "trodden black" by
passersby. So the speaker has tried to choose the road that seemed less traveled, but couldn't tell
which road was actually less traveled. By making a choice, the speaker will now never get the
chance to experience the other road and can never know which was less traveled. The speaker
hides from this psychic pain by announcing that he or she is just saving "the first [road] for
another day!" But, again, reality sets in: "I doubted if I should ever come back." Every choice
may be a beginning, but it is also an ending, and having to choose cuts off knowledge of the
alternate choice, such that the person choosing will never know if they made the "right" choice.

The poem ends with the speaker imagining the far future, when he or she thinks back to this
choice and believes that it made "all the difference." But the rest of the poem has shown that the
speaker doesn't (and can never) know what it would have been like to travel down that other road
—and can't even know if the road taken was indeed the one less traveled. And, further, the final
line is a subtle reminder that the only thing one can know about the choices one makes in life is
that they make “all the difference” but how, or from what, neither the poem nor life provide any
answer.

In "The Road Not Taken," the speaker is faced with a choice between two roads and elects to
travel by the one that appears to be slightly less worn. The diverging roads may be read as being
an extended metaphor for two kinds of life choices in general: the conventional versus the
unconventional. By choosing the less-traveled path over the well-traveled path, the speaker
suggests that he or she values individualism over conformity. The speaker, when deciding which
road to take, notes that the second is “just as fair” as the first, but that it has “perhaps the better
cause it was grassy and wanted wear.” In other words, the second road had the added benefit of
being less well-worn than the first. Notably, this absence of signs of travel is phrased positively
rather than negatively. Rather than stating outright that the road looked as if it had not had many
travelers, the speaker states that it was “grassy” (a consequence of low foot traffic) and that it
“wanted wear” (as if it were almost asking for the speaker to walk on it). The speaker presents
nonconformity as a positive trait, and even implies that popularity can make things less
appealing: the first road, because of its popularity, lacks the grass that makes the second path so
enticing. Despite the speaker’s preference for nonconformity, though, the poem ultimately
remains ambiguous about whether choosing the road “less traveled” necessarily leads to a better
or more interesting life. First, the poem questions whether it's actually even possible to identify
what is non-conformist. After choosing the road that seems to have been less traveler the
speaker then comments that, in fact, the two roads had been "worn ... really about the same." The
speaker seems to sense that though he or she has attempted to take the road "less traveled,"
there's no actual way to know if it was less traveled.

Second, the poem subtly questions its own final line, in which the speaker asserts that choosing
the road he or she did actually take has made "all the difference.” Many readers interpret this
final line as being an affirmation of the speaker’s decision to venture off the beaten path. But
note that the poem is careful not to state that choosing the road less traveled has necessarily
made a positive difference. Further, because the poem has raised the possibility that the path the
speaker took was not in fact "less traveled," it also raises the possibility that the speaker is
wrong, and taking that particular path can't be said to have made any specific difference at all.