FROST IS ALWAYS BEING RESCUED, always being reclaimed. He’s like a disputed frontier, constantly contested, and this book is yet another stone thrown in that conflict. “No sweeter music can come to my ears,” said Frost, “than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down.” But it’s worth wondering whether the question ought not be what side a reader has taken with regard to Frost—benevolent or terrifying, modern poet or folk bard—but which choice a reader feels he has to confront. Because Frost trails contradictions like the wake from a battleship. Should we question his popularity, which seems so at odds with his massive erudition and technical accomplishment? Should we question his sincerity, which seems so dubious when one reads the scornful letters he wrote about his peers, and even his friends? Should we worry he is too much like us, or not enough?

Better, maybe, to think of Frost as a poet who asks us to ask these sorts of questions. It doesn’t matter whether the “real” Frost is courtly or frightening, because the point is simply to make us wonder about “realness,” about authenticity, about what it would mean to be truly sincere. In this sense, Frost is always placing us at the beginning of his most famous poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood . . .

The moment at the crossroads is the moment in which all decisions are equally likely. We haven’t moved, we haven’t chosen, we haven’t sinned. And of course, one goes to the crossroads to meet the Devil, the angel who is also a monster. One goes to the crossroads to find America, the free land born in slavery. One goes to the crossroads to meet Robert Frost.

The Poem

My poems—I should suppose everybody’s poems—are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark.

FROST TO LEONIDAS W. PAYNE JR., November 1, 1927

The Road Not Taken” has confused audiences literally from the beginning. In the spring of 1915, Frost sent an envelope to Edward Thomas that contained only one item: a draft of “The Road Not Taken,” under the title “Two Roads.” According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost had been inspired to write the poem by Thomas’s habit of regretting whatever path the pair took during their long walks in the countryside—an impulse that Frost equated with the romantic predisposition for “crying over what might have been.” Frost, Thompson writes, believed that his friend “would take the poem as a gentle joke and would protest, ‘Stop teasing me.’”