As many critics have noted, “Directive” contains elements from dozens of Frost’s earlier poems and critical pronouncements. But it’s rarely connected with “The Road Not Taken”; indeed, the two are more likely to be contrasted than linked. Writing in Slate, for example, Robert Pinsky asserts that “works like ‘The Road Not Taken’ do not unsettle or revise any 19th-century notions of form or idea,” whereas “Frost’s greatest poems, such as ‘Directive’ and ‘The Most of It,’ do radically challenge and reimagine old conceptions of memory, culture, and ways of beholding nature.”

It’s easy to see why some readers think this way. “Directive” looks and feels both contemporary and significant. It shifts from one scene to another with little warning, it uses a motley palette of tones rather than one dominant, reliable voice, it’s simultaneously rhetorical and punning (“no playhouse but a house in earnest”), and it drops numerous hints that it should be categorized as a Major Work. When David Lehman, the editor of the Best American Poetry series, asked his guest editors—all eminent contemporary poets—to name the greatest American poems of the century, “Directive” was one of three Frost poems to receive multiple votes. “The Road Not Taken” didn’t make the list, although it was named America’s favorite poem by the thousands of readers who participated in Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project. This is to be expected. “Directive” has become the poem that dedicated readers—the same readers who consider “The Road Not Taken” a minor, dark joke—most admire. “This is the poem,” Frost told an early biographer, “that converted the other group [the followers of T. S. Eliot]. There I rest my case.” It makes sense, then, that “Directive” continues to impress Eliot’s heirs. Reading it, you feel that if John Ashbery were to write a Robert Frost poem, this is what it would sound like.

And yet there is good reason to connect the much celebrated “Directive” with the frequently derided “The Road Not Taken.” “Directive” is the poem in which Frost makes his way back to the crossroads—but as an approximation of himself, not as a version of Edward Thomas. It’s a poem about the aftermath of choice: It is Frost’s version of the “sigh.” In exploring the domestic tragedies that are often considered to be sources for the poem’s central images, Mark Richardson argues, “it is not going too far to say that in ‘Directive’ Frost returns to the scene of the crime, so to speak, and that he has come here to ask, in light of the patently ‘liturgical’ qualities of the poem, to be shriven.” Richardson then quotes Reuben Brower, one of Frost’s old students, who claims “Directive” is a return “to the beginning of his life and his poetry, but it is a return after having taken one road rather than another”—an echo from “The Road Not Taken” that is revealing even if unintentional.