|
Robert Frost, 1874-1963, U.S.: experimental innovator
The year was 1914. Robert Frost, age 40 – former school teacher, former chicken farmer, former newspaper reporter -- had moved to England to give his faltering poetry career a boost. His plan was to write full-time and introduce himself to a British audience.
The strategy was a success. His first book of  poetry, A Boy's Will, was published in London in May 1913 and received mixed reviews. His second volume, North of Boston, came out a year later to favorable reviews. Now he had high hopes that at last he would break into the American publishing world.
With that goal in mind, and with the prospect of war looming in Europe, Frost would soon return to the United States. But first, he and his family rented a cottage in Gloucestershire for the spring and summer. As their first visitors, they invited a new friend, Welsh writer Edward Thomas, and his family.
While the Frost children and the Thomas children entertained each other, their fathers walked through the countryside with Thomas acting as guide. He took Frost along flower-lined lanes, through woods and heather, to the top of May Hill, where Thomas could look west toward Wales and name the mountains he knew there. As they walked, they talked about botany and poetry.
The Thomas family’s visit was so enjoyable that Frost convinced them to return and rent the neighboring cottage for the month of August. During that month, the two friends again tramped along country lanes, searching for rare plants. Against the backdrop of war breaking out on the continent, their walks were a delight for Frost, but a problem for Thomas. Thomas was never satisfied. At the end of each expedition, he would complain that they had missed the best specimens. Each time he would apologize that he had chosen the wrong route. Frost teasingly told Thomas that only a romantic would get so much pleasure from bemoaning the loss of what might have been.
“No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh and wish you’d taken another,” he said.
Frost spotted the makings of a poem in his friend’s amusing regrets. He began writing some verses at the Gloucestershire cottage, penning the final stanza first. Frost finished the poem after he returned to the United States early the next year. In its final form, it describes a choice between two essentially equal alternative routes:
…the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
In the poem’s concluding stanza, though, that choice has become a source of wistful regret mixed with a hint of self-satisfaction. The contrast between the two options has also become clearer: in retrospect, the chosen road was the less-traveled one.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
In later years, Frost warned audiences that “The Road Not Taken” was a tricky poem, but he had thought that Thomas, at least, would understand it. Frost sent him an early copy, but Thomas gave no sign that he saw in the poem what Frost did. Until Frost nudged him, Thomas recognized neither its portrayal of him nor its gentle parody of his romantic regrets.
“You have got me again over the Path not taken & no mistake,” Thomas wrote after Frost explained it to him. Thomas then added an accurate forecast that the poem’s subtle humor would be missed by most readers. “I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them & advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.”
With its mix of trickiness, nostalgia and self-congratulation, “The Road Not Taken” became one of Frost’s most popular poems. Written when he was 42, it is one of three Frost works in a list of the 20 most frequently reprinted American poems. The other two are “Mending Wall,” which Frost wrote at age 38, and “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” his most frequently reprinted work, which he wrote at age 48.
How that account fits with the description of Frost as an experimental innovator. Plus, how T.S. Eliot fits the description of a conceptual innovator.
|
