Multiple options. There are only two roads, not three or four. And the two roads don’t offer obvious additional options, as might be the case if, for instance, the speaker could see that one of the roads branched into two more roads only a hundred feet down the trail.

Options that lack differentiating qualities. True, the two roads are worn “really about the same” and “equally lay / In leaves,” but this doesn’t mean the roads are indiscernible. By contrast, consider choosing among cans of Campbell’s tomato soup at the grocery store, or among individual pieces of white paper in a five-hundred-sheet pack.

Trivial options. For instance, the speaker isn’t debating whether to begin walking by stepping with his right foot or with his left, or what tune to whistle as he strolls on. Yet consider how many of our daily decisions are of precisely this minor sort.

A choice not to choose. At no point does Frost suggest that the speaker might simply turn around or sit down or blaze a trail separate from the roads (an action that would arguably be more in keeping with the poem’s traditional interpretation as a monument to individualism).

So if all these potential dimensions of choice (a list that could easily be longer) are missing from the poem, what are we left with? A kind of idealized or “pure” choice. A choice from which most of the factors that can complicate or undermine individual decision making have been deliberately withheld. A choice, then, that seems to occur in perfect laboratory conditions for testing a very old idea: that a free agent acting freely can make a decision that matters.

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WHICH IS A NOTION that has long been central to Western civilization, particularly in its late-blossoming manifestation in the United States. Indeed, the theme of choosing runs through American history and culture at least as deeply as its close cousins freedom and individualism. The Declaration of Independence declares the “pursuit of happiness” to be a natural right, which presupposes that there are choices that would make such a pursuit possible. (To pursue, after all, it is necessary to choose.) John Adams defines individual liberty as “a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice”—a way of thinking that is essential to the democratic process, however imperfectly it may be realized in practice. The more one thinks about Adams’s “self-determining power,” the more it seems inseparable from most of the values and ideas that underpin (or are usually said to underpin) American society. Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, claims that the people of the United States are distinguished by their belief in human perfectability, a concept that assumes the humans in question can make choices that will lead to improvement. As he puts it, “Thus, forever seeking, forever falling to rise again, often disappointed, but not discouraged, [the American] tends unceasingly towards that unmeasured greatness so indistinctly visible at the end of the long track which humanity has yet to tread.”