As do Robert Frost and “The Road Not Taken.” Frost is the great poet of the liminal, and his natural terrain is the unsettled intersection of opposing paths. “All the fun,” he wrote to Louis Untermeyer, “is outside saying things that suggest formulae that won’t formulate—that almost but don’t quite formulate. I should like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious.” In another letter to Untermeyer, Frost begins by proclaiming himself “orthodox” and in opposition to “mad glad stuff,” but this train of thought rapidly gives way to a vision of the uncanny disturbance at the core of his own practice:

The conviction closes in on me that I was cast for gloom as the sparks fly upward, I was about to say: I am of deep shadow all compact like onion within onion and the savor of me is oil of tears. I have heard laughter by daylight when I thought it was my own because at that moment when it broke I had parted my lips to take food. Just so I have been afraid of myself and caught at my throat when I thought I was making some terrible din of a mill whistle that happened to come on the same instant with the opening of my mouth to yawn. But I have not laughed. No man can tell you the sound or the way of my laughter. I have neighed at night in the woods behind a house like vampires. But there are no vampires there are no ghouls there are no demons, there is no nothing but me.

“There is no nothing but me” at the crossroads, where a mouth opens without a reliable connection to the “I” that should govern it, and where the mind turns to the rise of the dead and the monstrous. It’s the kind of place where one would need a guide, though if he is Robert Frost, he will “only [have] at heart your getting lost,” as he writes in “Directive.”

It may seem odd for such a liminal figure to have become so thoroughly equated with a country often considered central to world affairs, whose leaders regularly refer to it as “the indispensable nation.” But the importance of the crossroads—and the poets and gods of the crossroads—is that they allow us to change, to escape, to emerge or disappear. In this sense, the United States is, perhaps above all else, a liminal territory. (“Is anything central?” asks John Ashbery in “The One Thing That Can Save America.”) When we think of Japan, we think of Mount Fuji; when we think of France, we think of the Eiffel Tower. Russia evokes the Winter Palace, India the Taj Mahal. But when we think of the United States, we see the Statue of Liberty: the sculpture that marks the threshold, the limen, as the Romans would have said. America, alone among nations, has as its most recognized symbol not one of its great buildings or natural features, but an invocation of its doorway. And a doorway, like a crossroads, is neither here nor there; it is a possibility. In the case of the Statue of Liberty, the doorway is even more striking because it was called forth not by the sculpture’s original conception (its designer, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, intended the figure to signify liberty shining outward from the United States to the rest of the world) but by a feature it acquired seventeen years after its October 1886 dedication. That feature was a poem, that most marginal of artistic productions, and it was inscribed on a bronze tablet that now rests inside the statue’s base. Here is the conclusion of “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus: