“And that the poet that created it, who we see as some sepia-toned antique figure on a mountaintop, he’s more interesting too.” “I hope that readers come away with the sense that the poem, whose language is almost as much a part of our cultural heritage as the Declaration of Independence, actually turns out to be more interesting and challenging than they realized,” said Orr, who came to Cornell this year and teaches a seminar in writing criticism.

“We may be deceiving ourselves about those big moments maybe they weren’t really choices in the way that we usually imagine.” “Once we all become older we look back at particular points in our lives and say, ‘Here’s the moment when I made an important decision,’” he said. Orr’s book examines the poem and its author, and explores the issues of choice and the chooser. He thought it was about Frost actually regretting things and not about him – it took six letters between them until Thomas understood.” “Frost wrote it as a joke and sent it to Thomas without any accompanying text. “They would take these walks in the woods together, and depending on the paths they would take, Thomas would instantly regret whatever path he’d taken,” Orr said. It’s more about the self-deception we practice when we tell the story of our own lives … the misunderstandings and corrections we keep making, and the anxiety we have about choice.”įrost often said he wrote it for his friend Edward Thomas, a poet and critic who was weighing a decision to enter the Army. “At the end, the speaker saying that in the future, I will be saying that the road that I took was the road less traveled. “But earlier in the poem, Frost has made very clear that the roads are interchangeable,” Orr said. Most readers, he said, focus only on the end of the poem giving it meaning: “I took the one less traveled by,/and that has made all the difference.” … Even readers who spend time studying it get it a little bit wrong.” “The drama of the poem revolves around the way we misinterpret it. But in fact, the standard interpretation is almost the opposite of what the poet meant,” said Orr, poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review and Professor of the Practice in Cornell’s Department of English. Hardly a graduation speech goes by that it is not quoted. And one of his best-known works may be his grandest joke of all, as detailed in a new book by David Orr, “The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong” (Penguin).

American poet Robert Frost was not above toying with his friends, or his readers.

Red frost poems