There are surely difficulties with this conception, as there are with all models of selfhood. But it’s interesting to see how the division of the self into three parts manages to accommodate the tangle of identity in “The Road Not Taken.” We have the “I” who thinks one road should be preferred because it seems “less traveled”—this establishes the speaker’s self-image as a person who favors solitary paths. Then we have the present self projecting into the future (“I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence”). And of course, we have the actual taking of the road, which Frost nicely complicates by making it unclear whether the speaker succeeded in explaining his choice to himself as something that arose from a cause. (The roads are, after all, “about the same.”) Perhaps what waits at the end of the road isn’t the authentic self, or a bundle of impressions, but a federation.

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BUT IF SO, it is a federation without neighboring states. The chooser is alone in “The Road Not Taken,” and the drama of the self unfolds in private. That privacy is somewhat surprising, given the poem’s supposed origin in the long walks Frost once took with Edward Thomas. Remember that Frost repeatedly claimed that he wrote “The Road Not Taken” as a way of gently teasing Thomas for his habit of reproaching himself for failing to take a path that might have led to more interesting scenery. But if Thomas regretted his choices in this way, it seems important to acknowledge that he did so because he wanted to show the passed-up scenery to Frost. The great significance of their walks was the companionship that these two men—each possessing a vast and idiosyncratic intelligence, and no longer young—found in their time together. It seems strange that one of the greatest intimacies of Frost’s life would become the source for a poem from which he appears to have excised his own role.

And yet, considered at the proper angle, it makes perfect sense. One of the strongest themes in Frost’s life and work is his belief in personal agency, whether conscious or (as he once put it) by “accidents on purpose.” Among American poets, he is the great individualist, to whom all connotations of that heavily freighted description fully apply. Consider this excerpt from The Paris Review’s interview with Frost in 1960, less than three years before his death:

INTERVIEWER: Your best friend in those years was Edward Thomas?