Thomas joined the British army shortly thereafter. He was killed two years later in the Battle of Arras, while lighting his pipe.

So the confusion embedded in “The Road Not Taken” is mirrored in the love and misunderstanding between its American author and his English friend. If this is an ironic parallel for such a thoroughly American poem, it’s also a fitting one. The ideas that the poem holds in tension—the notion of choice, the possibility of self-deception—are concepts that define not just the United States, in all its ambiguity, but the responses that the United States inspires in and from citizens of other countries. There is the admirable self-reliance and the towering egoism; the emphasis on liberty and the thirst for control. There is the grandeur, and there is the hypocrisy. These contradictions come together in the idea of “self-determining power” that proved fatally compelling for Edward Thomas. This is why it’s not so surprising, after all, to see “The Road Not Taken” used in a twenty-first-century Ford commercial in New Zealand. The iconic American poem, the iconic American brand—what better pairing to convince a Kiwi that his own “self-determining power” is central to the life he will lead and the choices he will make? And that this power would be enhanced by the purchase of a Taurus?

At the same time, of course, the advertisement itself is an attempt to undermine that power and replace it with the judgment of the advertiser and his client. It is, in one sense, a deception—as is “The Road Not Taken.” Yet for all its trickery, no text from the past hundred years better captures the difficult essence of American experience, or more successfully translates that essence into a figure useful to people far beyond the borders of the United States. “The Road Not Taken” is a literary oddity and a philosophical puzzle, but more than anything else it’s a way of framing the paradoxical and massively influential culture in which it both begins and ends.

The chapters that follow will examine these ideas through four windows. First, in “The Poet,” I’ll discuss the life of its author, Robert Frost, whose career parallels the reception of his least understood creation. Second, in “The Poem,” I’ll focus on “The Road Not Taken” itself: its origins, its teasing, contradictory lines, and its connections to Frost’s later work. Finally, in “The Choice” and “The Chooser,” I’ll discuss the cultural and philosophical ramifications of Frost and his poem—a journey that should show how twenty short lines can change how we see the world, and how the world sees us.

The Poet