FROST: Yes—quite separate again from everybody his age. He was as isolated as I was. Nobody knew he wrote poetry. He didn’t write poetry until he started to war, and that had something to do with my life with him. We got to be great friends. No, I had an instinct against belonging to any of those crowds. I’ve had friends, but very scattering, a scattering over there. You know, I could have . . . Pound had an afternoon meeting once a week with Flint and Aldington and H. D. and at one time Hulme, I think. Hulme started with them. They met every week to rewrite each other’s poems.

INTERVIEWER: You saw Hulme occasionally? Was it at these rewriting sessions, or didn’t you bother with them?

FROST: Yes, I knew Hulme, knew him quite well. But I never went to one of those meetings. I said to Pound, “What do you do?” He said, “Rewrite each other’s poems.” And I said, “Why?” He said, “To squeeze the water out of them.” “That sounds like a parlor game to me,” I said, “and I’m a serious artist”—kidding, you know. And he laughed and he didn’t invite me any more.

One sees every side of Frost’s individualism here: the barely concealed loneliness (“as isolated as I was”), the simmering pride (“I had an instinct against belonging to any of those crowds”), the contempt for those with less faith in their own standards (“‘That sounds like a parlor game to me,’ I said”). “The Road Not Taken” may well have begun as a joke, but as it became a poem—as it began “to brave alien entanglements,” as Frost would say—it took on the rocky demeanor of its maker. Two friends—“He was as isolated as I was”—became one chooser, whether by merger or separation.

The model of the self that results is particularly, though not exclusively, American. Whether the average person in the United States talks about the self as being “created” or “found” or both, that person generally has in mind a self that is oriented toward, well, itself. That is, we assume that selves are strongly centered in individual people; that they are, in fact, what helps make those people individuals in the first place. For the past three decades, cross-cultural psychologists have been studying the ways in which different societies approach questions of agency, choice, and self-construction. The consensus holds that societies that are inclined toward individualism—the United States is usually considered the exemplar—tend to produce people whose self-conceptions depend on precisely this strong separation between themselves and others. The Western “I,” according to this view, takes itself as “the ultimate reference point,” as the social psychologist Sheena Iyengar puts it, or “the decider,” as George W. Bush would have it. This model is sometimes referred to as the “independent self.”