But is this view of “The Road Not Taken” and its creator entirely accurate? Poems, after all, aren’t arguments—they are to be interpreted, not proven, and that process of interpretation admits a range of possibilities, some supported by diction, some by tone, some by quirks of form and structure. Certainly it’s wrong to say that “The Road Not Taken” is a straightforward and sentimental celebration of individualism: This interpretation is contradicted by the poem’s own lines. Yet it’s also not quite right to say that the poem is merely a knowing literary joke disguised as shopworn magazine verse that has somehow managed to fool millions of readers for a hundred years. A role too artfully assumed ceases to become a role and instead becomes a species of identity—an observation equally true of Robert Frost himself. One of Frost’s greatest advocates, the scholar Richard Poirier, has written with regard to Frost’s recognition among ordinary readers that “there is no point trying to explain the popularity away, as if it were a misconception prompted by a pose.” By the same token, there is no point in trying to explain away the general misreadings of “The Road Not Taken,” as if they were a mistake encouraged by a fraud. The poem both is and isn’t about individualism, and it both is and isn’t about rationalization. It isn’t a wolf in sheep’s clothing so much as a wolf that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is also a wolf. It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.

____

IN THIS IT HAS a distinctly American flavor. American culture foregrounds the issue of choice itself, regardless of the results. Captain Ahab pursues the white whale not at the direction of a god or a king, but at the bidding of a choice inflated into mania. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is haunted by the fact that one of its main characters, Jim, is legally unable to choose—and yet does so anyway. Casablanca builds toward Rick’s climactic choice while suggesting that even the personal decisions of a hard-drinking, heartbroken club owner are intertwined with political actions that affect millions. It’s a way of thinking that flows naturally from the United States’ earliest history. Here is John Adams writing to John Taylor in 1814:

Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. . . . The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil.