“The Road Not Taken” is a series of such masks. Though the poem is (to an extent) about Edward Thomas, the “I” of the poem isn’t purely Thomas any more than the “I” of, say, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is Frost. Rather, Frost gives us a speaker whose identity—whose self—is an interplay of questions about personhood. As the poem progresses, these questions emerge in the uncertain ground between the poem’s popular interpretation and its more critically acceptable reading. The former imagines a self that is unified and authentic—a self that has chosen the less traveled road to emerge in its full splendor. The latter presupposes a fragmentary, improvisational sort of self that is unsure of its own choices, aware of its tendency to invent explanations for events over which it has no control, and skeptical of its future stability.

In keeping with his usual habits, Frost provides support for both positions, and potential responses for nearly all questions that anyone might ask. Consider the poem’s second and third lines:

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler . . .

As I said in “The Poem,” these lines imply that we are changed by the choices we make. (Frost underscores this potential reading a few lines later when he claims, “I doubted if I should ever come back.”) So the suggestion, it would appear, is that the self is created. And yet if we take the lines even more literally, we can get another curious angle on the self, although it involves a slightly baroque thought experiment. Imagine that as he ponders the roads, the speaker tries to travel both by undergoing a fission process that will send half of his brain down one road and half down the other, without causing him any permanent harm. He does so, and each brain hemisphere proceeds down one branch of the fork. But because “I could not travel both / And be one traveler”—that is, one “I”—the self doesn’t survive the process. Either it’s attached to one of the travelers or it has been destroyed. The implication here is that the self possesses an unsplittable core that makes us us.

This may seem like too much meaning to extract from nine words. Even the best poets have bad moments, and it’s tempting to suppose that in writing this odd description from which so many peculiar meanings can be drawn, Frost might simply have been clumsy. It’s possible, of course. But the appearance of clumsiness is rarely to be trusted in a writer so eager to be underestimated, and in this case it’s a judgment to be especially wary of. In a letter from 1912 to Susan Hayes Ward, one of his few early supporters, Frost wrote of walking down a country lane as it approached a crossroads and meeting