“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

This is the sort of grand vision of liminality that the United States often calls forth. We are the threshold nation, the American self-myth says, offering doorway after doorway, behind each of which lies a new beginning.

This may be true, or nearly true. But there is a quieter, yet no less persistent, corollary: Those who pass through those doors will one day lift their own small light in a yellow wood, where two roads diverge. And it will make all the difference.

Acknowledgments

Ann Godoff, my editor, has been the truest friend and ally this book could have hoped for. I’m grateful in addition to the following people at Penguin Press: Benjamin Platt, Barbara Campo, Matt Boyd, Will Palmer, Sarah Hutson, Yamil Anglada, and Colin Dickerman (now at Flatiron Books).

Betsy Lerner, my agent, guides all of my writing that reaches book form. That’s doubly true in this case, since this project was her inspiration.

Like anyone who writes on Robert Frost, I’m indebted to the scholars and Frost devotees who have spent decades tending the poet’s legacy. Men work together, as the young Frost said, whether they work together or apart.

And I’m grateful as always to my family.

Further Reading on Robert Frost and “The Road Not Taken”

There are dozens of worthwhile books on Robert Frost. I’ve limited myself below to works that were particularly useful in this project and that I thought might appeal to general readers. I’ve necessarily excluded a number of admirable scholarly studies that are primarily engaged with other aspects of Frost (for instance, Robert Faggen’s Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin), as well as some very fine books that are no longer in print (Reuben Brower’s The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention).

WORK BY ROBERT FROST

Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. This Library of America edition is the most reliable and comprehensive version of Frost’s writing currently available. It includes everything but Frost’s letters, so if you’re looking for an all-encompassing Frost book, this is far and away the best option. It’s only published in hardback, however, so for a paperback version of Frost’s complete poetry, you’ll have to go with the questionably edited The Poetry of Robert Frost, prepared by Edward Lathem. (For the early poems, a better option is Robert Faggen’s Early Poems: Robert Frost, which also includes a sampling from Frost’s fourth book, New Hampshire.) For a paperback collection of Frost’s prose, the best option is The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, edited by Mark Richardson.