We want to believe that roads are taken (or not) by a “self-determining power” that can “elect between objects,” as Adams puts it. Indeed, the nation’s founding assertion that everyone is entitled to the “pursuit of happiness” assumes that a path can be chosen that will make that pursuit possible. Frost’s lines simultaneously embody and undercut these ideas, but the ideas themselves are as American as action movies.

It’s perhaps ironic, then, that “The Road Not Taken” was written in England and inspired by the indecisiveness of an Englishman. That Englishman, the poet Edward Thomas, was, as Frost later put it, “the only brother I ever had.” In 1912, when he was nearly forty years old, Frost traveled to Great Britain with his family in a last-ditch effort to improve his literary prospects; he was at that time almost completely unknown in the United States. He managed to get his work published in London, but it went mostly unnoticed until Thomas (then a prominent literary journalist) declared his second collection “one of the most revolutionary books of modern times.” The men became good friends afterwards, and Thomas frequently visited Frost at his cottage in Gloucestershire. Throughout 1914, Frost and Thomas regularly took long walks in the woods and, according to Frost, these conversational rambles formed the basis for “The Road Not Taken.” In the words of Lawrance Thompson, Frost’s biographer:

Repeatedly, while these two men had botanized in England together—Thomas leading the way through his favorite countryside in the hope of showing his American friend an extraordinary station of rare plants—these ventures had ended in self-reproachful sighs and regrets. Even the most successful of these walks failed to satisfy Thomas’s fastidiousness. He blamed himself for having made the wrong choice of location and would sigh wistfully over the lovely specimens he might have shown if only he had taken Frost to a different place.

Frost sent the poem to Thomas soon after he finished it, in early 1915. Britain was at war then, and Thomas had been debating whether or not to enlist. He was troubled and confused by the poem, and might even have read it as a goad. Matthew Hollis argues for this possibility in Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas:

It pricked at his confidence. . . . The one man who understood his indecisiveness the most astutely—in particular, towards the war—appeared to be mocking him for it. . . . How free-spirited his friend seemed in comparison. This American who sailed for England on a long-shot, knowing no one and without a place to go, rode his literary fortunes and won his prize, then set sail again to make himself a new home. . . . “The Road Not Taken” did not send Thomas to war, but it was the last and pivotal moment in a sequence of events that had brought him to an irreversible decision.