Robert Frost's "the Road Not Taken"

President John F. Kennedy summed up the level of fame and influence that Robert Frost possessed. Kennedy said, "He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding."

Robert Frost was born in 1874 in San Francisco, California. When he moved to New England, he became interested in reading and writing poetry. He enrolled in Dartmouth College as well as Harvard University, but he never received a degree. After leaving school, Frost worked as a teacher, cobbler, and he was the editor of the Lawrence Sentinel, of Lawrence Massachusetts. In 1894, Frost was published for the first time. His poem, "My Butterfly" was featured in The Independent ("Robert Frost").

When Robert Frost was married in 1895, his wife Elinor became an inspiration for Frost's writings. After their farm in New Hampshire became a failure, the couple moved to England in 1912. This relocation allowed Frost to be influenced by British poets of the time, such as Edward Thomas and Robert Graves. Ezra Pound, another poet, became friends with Mr.Frost and helped promote him and publish his works. Robert and Elinor did not stay in England long though, as the couple returned to the United States in 1915. Frost had published two full-length collections of poems and had established a reputation for himself. As Frost continued to publish his works through the nineteen twenties, he became more recognized and more famous. Until his death in 1963, Robert Frost continued to publish his work, and he also taught in Massachusetts and Vermont ("Robert Frost").

In 1916, the third collection of Frost's poems was published under the title, Mountain Interval. Featured in this collection was the poem, "The Road Not Taken." The poem is very well known, not just by fans of Robert Frost, but by many people all over the planet. The poem is about a speaker that is standing in the woods.

The person in the woods is stopped at a fork in the road, and they are considering their options for traveling farther on the road. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood/And sorry I could not travel both." Both of the potential routes are equally worn and both ways are filled with un-trodden leaves, meaning that neither of the paths have been recently traveled. "Though as for that,the passing there/Had worn them really about the same." The speaker ultimately chooses one path over the other. The speaker tells himself that he will take the other route on another day, "Oh, I kept the first for another day!" Right after he says this though, the speaker decides that he probably won't have the opportunity to go back and traverse the path that he neglected earlier. "Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back." The speaker ends the poem by trying to justify his choice. He says that he took the road less traveled, and that was the best choice. "I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference," ("Frost's Early Poems").

"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is one of the poet's most famous works, and many people interpret it to mean a similar thing. I believe that this poem has two