'The Road Not Taken': (Mis)Understanding Robert Frost

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 this week's episode of “Beyond the Verse,” the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, Joe and Maiya explore the poem 'The Road Not Taken' by Robert Frost, and its induction into the social sphere as a poem that is so often misquoted.

They discuss 'The Road Not Taken' (1915), exploring the public's misinterpretation of the poem, the American pastoral tradition and how it moves forward into the future, as well as Frost's position in the American canon. Joe and Maiya discuss Frost's enduring influence and transformation into one of modern times' most revered poets.

Get PDFs on 'The Road Not Taken' exclusive to Poetry+ users:

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• Poetry Snapshot PDF
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  • With Rhyme Scheme
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  • With both Rhyme and Meter

For more information on Frost and his work, check out poemanaylsis.com, where you can find a huge selection of analysed poems, with PDFs to aid, and explorations in our extensive PDF Learning Library - see our Robert Frost PDF Guide!

Plus, stay tuned to get some recommendations for alternate poets that have been inspired by Frost's work!

Tune in and Discover:

• Frost's position in the canon and role in American poetic tradition
• Key themes throughout 'The Road Not Taken' and the poet's other work
• Friends and influences of Frost
• The Great American pastoral tradition

Transcript

'The Road Not Taken': (Mis)Understanding Robert Frost (Transcript)

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Joe: [00:00:00] 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 travelled by, and that has made all the difference. Welcome back to Beyond the Verse with me, Joe, and my co host Maya. Today we're going to be talking about one of the most famous poems of the 20th century, Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, one of the most misunderstood poems as we're going to go on to discuss.

So welcome Maya, why don't you tell us a little bit about the poem, its key themes, and some of the discussion points we're going to be covering today.

Maiya: Well, Joe, as you mentioned, this poem is one of the most misunderstood and I think misquoted poems, of our day and age. We are going to cover how it's misinterpreted in public consciousness. We're going to look a little bit at the [00:01:00] American pastoral, the tradition and how it moves forward into the future.

And we're going to address Frost's position in the American poetic tradition as well. So, Joe. What is this poem actually about, or how is it perceived in the public consciousness?

Joe: So the poem is one that people think they know really well, like lots of poems that people think they know really well, they tend to misinterpret it and misinterpret the key ideas. So The poem itself is actually a relatively simple narrative about two individuals who are on a walk, through a wood, and they come across, a fork in the road and they decide which one to take.

The place it occupies in the public consciousness is fascinating to me, because it's one of these poems that people think they know really well, and it is often. talked about as this great call to transgression, this great call to individuality, this sort of reminder that people should take the road that they want to take regardless of what other people around them are doing, this rejection of society.

In actual fact, the poem is making no such claims. It's far less didactic, it's [00:02:00] far less moralizing than that. The poem was written kind of as a joke, it seems to be. Robert Frost was living in England at the time he wrote the poem. He had a close friend, Edward Thomas, fellow poet, who we're going to talk about a little bit later on, and they used to take country walks together, and on many of these walks, Edward Thomas apparently used to fixate a lot on which, fork they took on their walks.

And the poem in many ways is a comment on the fact that regardless of the decisions we make, we're gonna end up regretting them and going over them in our minds and fixating on them. It's, it's far less of a clear cut message than people imagine, but I'm always interested about these poems that take on, meanings that perhaps are divorced from the poems themselves.

So where, where do you think that comes from?

Maiya: I think, as you say, it's a really interesting poem to look at. I think, for me, looking at the timing is very important. Obviously this poem was being received by the public in 1915 1916, which was in the midst of the First World War. When you look at huge world events like that, There is [00:03:00] naturally going to be a movement by readers, by listeners, who are looking for a sort of moral message within poems like this.

And it's interesting that you say, obviously, this poem was written almost in a comedic sense, or at least the story behind it seems to be comedic. But the way that people receive it is not comedic in the slightest. With the influence of the first world war and that, that hunt for a moral message, this poem is very often taken as one that assesses your choices and assesses how moral those choices are and whether they were right or whether they were wrong. 

you look at, you know, Edward Thomas, who he used to walk with. His poems, The Signpost or Lights Out, they all have a very similar thread through them, of choice being incredibly important to the speaker. And the setting of a lot of these poems is pastoral, so they use the field or the hill or the woods as a space [00:04:00] to lay out those choices and those worries and those anxieties. So in terms of that search for morality from readers or Frost's intentions for this poem, how do you think Frost sits within the poetic canon for this specific poem?

Joe: Well, it's a really interesting question, and I think, as with many of these discussions, the poem's afterlife only becomes clear much later. So, it's important to mention that Edward Thomas, , after this poem was published, went to fight in the First World War and was killed in the First World War, and a lot of the moral lessons that are drawn from the poem are drawn in that context.

I think your point earlier about the significance of the war is a really fascinating one and it plays upon our, our human temptation to overstate the importance of our own decisions. There is that sense all the way through of a tension between the negligible impact our decisions make, and the feeling that we can influence events.

Most historical events are not decided by any individual decisions, but [00:05:00] poems like this tend to frame moments of indecision as great, points at which history rests, and history pivots on those moments, when in actual fact, most events happen regardless of what we try to do, and that sense of powerlessness is often hard to wrestle with. On that point about where Frost sits in the canon, it's really important to remember what that canon looks like in 1915. Now we're coming off the back of Well over a hundred years of the American poetic tradition. You've got huge figures, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, etc. But poetry was changing and Frost, in many ways, had a decision to make about where he stood in relation to that change.

So, the mid 19 teens is sort of early stages of literary modernism. , people like Ezra Pound were doing very innovative and transgressive things with the imagist movement. It's only a few years before publication of poems like The Wasteland, which completely redefined what was perceived to be possible in, with regard to poetry.

Now Frost is at an interesting point in his own career, it's his third [00:06:00] collection in which , this poem features. He published it for the first time in 1915 in a magazine and in his collection the following year. He was beginning to establish himself as a poet, but he was not the icon that he went on to become yet.

Frost, by the end of his career, you know, picked up awards like they were going out of fashion. He becomes this enormous figure in American poetry. He was not yet that figure. He's a very formally traditional poet at a time where there was a move towards free verse, there was a move towards rejecting those forms, and we'll talk more later on the podcast about that.

How he diverged from those literary forms, but that's where he is in 1915 16. Anything to add there, Maya?

Maiya: I think what you mentioned about the, the diversion from literary tradition is critical to the reception of this poem because obviously within this poem Frost is hinting that the road less traveled is not necessarily the best decision.

For him, I personally believe that he was writing at a time where modernist poets [00:07:00] were actually challenging those more traditional elements that Frost is very evidently tied into. I think when you look at the reception of this poem publicly and how I do think some people view Frost as a transgressive poet because of this specific poem and their misinterpretation of it.

Actually, the argument that's being made is against transgression. , he's saying the road that is less traveled, the one that people are pushing down, free verse, actually requires more structure, or actually I would rather take a road that I'm more familiar with because I understand it more. You know, discussing inheritance.

Do you think this inheritance of traditionalism, do you think the buck kind of stops with him?

Joe: Wow, I mean, I think it's a really difficult one to to determine Conclusively, I think that in many ways Frost can be regarded as the last great American [00:08:00] formal poet., There is no denying that there is a seed change around this point.

You know, the move within poetry is after this point, almost immediately after 1915, going in a direction that Frost is not. And so inevitably, he sort of stands alone on an island all of his own. 

But I think there is no denying that. Because he was the one of the last people of his era really banging the drum for those forms, he does acquire some of the shine of the poets that came before him, in a way that perhaps more transgressive literary movements, of which the 1920s is a real party of different literary movements, and all of them were trying to do transgressive and different things.

In that context, actually paying homage to the past without looking to break it, does mean that you acquire some of , , the adulation that those previous poets had. And I, I do think that has helped his legacy. The idea that he is, as you said, the inheritor, the last true, incumbent of the American tradition, if [00:09:00] that makes sense.

Maiya: I think especially when you look at that turning point and, you know, you mentioned Ezra Pound, if you compare an Ezra Pound poem to a Robert Frost poem, you see a very, very significant change. And part of me almost wants to say that that comparison can also help the other poems become that much richer.

Joe: I completely agree, and I think that the thing that any true transgressive knows is you can't be transgressive unless you're writing against a really strong tradition. So the true masters of the early 20th century with regard to poetry are, you know, people like Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot, of course.

And the more transgressive the poet is, the more they understand the tradition with which they are in conflict. I think that we have to view those diverging traditions as two sides of the same coin rather than two opposing armies trying to destroy each other.

Maiya: For sure, and I think for me reading this poem, I definitely feel some of that anxiety about the state of the [00:10:00] canon creeping into the poem itself. You look at the setting in which the poem is placed, you look at some of the language Frost uses, I mean I'd really like to touch on the use of colour here.

So if you look at the opening stanza. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. That, to me, you know, aside from personal views , on whether this poem is transgressive or not, It's a beautiful opening line to begin with, and comes with so much context.

I mean, do you want to begin on that, yellowing in the poem?

Joe: Yeah, I'd absolutely love to dive in on that.

So let's just dive straight into yellow. When leaves and branches and woods are yellow, normally, in the kind of climates that this poem is written in, it's written about the forests in the UK, you're thinking about a setting that is likely autumnal, and that word yellow has connotations often of things that are sickly, things that are perhaps beginning the process of decay.

Well, again, symbolically we can do loads with [00:11:00] that. On the one hand, Retroactively, we can look at this as sort of the death of that tradition that Frost belongs to, or certainly obviously in, the context of woods. Autumn goes into winter. Winter is followed by spring, and it's not death so much as it is a process of renewal.

But regardless, it's an inflection point and the use of that word yellow suggests to me that Frost is aware of the fact that canon he is belonging to is either in decline or is undergoing a process of renewal.

I think we can also look at , the sort of more traditional reading of the poem, which is about the death of Edward Thomas, his friend. There is a, what I think, somewhat reductive view that Edward Thomas was somehow influenced by this poem to sign up for the First World War, the war in which he was killed.

Now, in my opinion, thanks. drawing too simple a conclusion from a poem like this, which ultimately, as we've said, was meant to be humorous. , but obviously this is a poem written about walks he took with a friend who died within two years. So when we think about that process of ending, in many ways, The death of Edward Thomas casts that in a very [00:12:00] different light.

But the thing that I find most interesting about The Yellow, and , I don't want to sort of spout Marxist literary theory here, but it undermines the value of the judgement itself.

The decision that this poem rests on, which is which path to take, Both parts, both pathways are in the same yellow wood. So regardless of which one you take, you are still in that yellow wood. The result then doesn't matter. And what this does is it plays upon our absolute obsession with our own autonomy.

We all think that we have the ability to shape our own destinies. Whereas Marxist literary theorists and Marxist historians would argue that Actually, history and society is driven by large socioeconomic factors, not individual choice. And I think that's what this poem is really about. Poking fun at our obsession with ourselves and our ability to shape our own destinies. I'd love to know what you think, Maya.

Maiya: I think you're so right. And your analysis of those approaches is particularly poignant. 

To refer back to the war, I think every GCSE A level class would teach [00:13:00] you as a very basic and kind of reductive point, yellow represents cowardice. And being framed by this war, the whole woods being represented by the colour yellow, working within those greater kind of socio economic factors, I do think this poem represents the anxieties that surround wartime, that surround his personal relationship with his friend, that surround his own worries about the state of the canon and moving forward and moving past what he views as tradition and correct and proper. This poem is almost suspended in time. The speaker doesn't really seem to have an awareness of the immediate past or the immediate future. You really get that sense as the poem moves forward that even though the speaker has chosen their path, they are already in the middle of making those regrets in their own sphere.

You open in a yellow wood and two stanzas later, he [00:14:00] makes a note that the leaves haven't been kind of stomped into blackness yet. So, There actually isn't a temporal decay there. You are still stuck in one singular moment. 

The speaker is reflecting at that current present moment. That to me speaks volumes about the mental state of the speaker and their understanding of their own anxieties. far more than it does to the journey or the destination.

....

Joe: I think a really interesting sort of follow on point to that is when we look at the final stanza, unlike the previous ones, the final stanza is looking forward into the future, but very much looking forward so that he can look back at the present moment. And I have this sense in the poem that the narrator feels held captive by the past and the future.

And his present moment is somehow paralysed by fear of having made the wrong decision in the past, and fear that he will look back in the future at the decision he's about to make with regret. And that sense of paralysis, you know, ultimately for me [00:15:00] is one of the defining traits of the poem. There is no clarity, there is no certainty, there is no didactic message.

This is a poem that speaks to indecision, uncertainty, regret, and the way in which those emotions can dictate our lives. 

Maiya: I do think that. That sense of suspension creates almost , a distancing factor between the reader and the speaker. , I personally find that the speaker's voice isn't too present in this poem. I think it's far more overshadowed by this looming sense of the wood , or the looming anxiety that surrounds the speaker's outlook. 

Joe: And on that fabulous point for Maya, we're going to take a quick break.

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welcome back to Beyond the Verse and Maya. I'd really love to know about where this poem and where Robert Frost more generally fits into the tradition of the American pastoral. I know you have a lot to say on this, but for the benefit of our listeners who might not be familiar, tell us a little bit about what the American pastoral is, what it means, where it comes from.

But

Maiya: So the pastoral tradition more often than not refers to works that are situated in and idealize rural landscapes and the speaker's connection to them. It's often used as a setting for reflection. With the American pastoral tradition, you're looking at a history that roots all the way back to the Romantics. This is something that [00:17:00] Frost is both playing on and subverting. think The Road Not Taken takes a lot of those very traditional elements, the landscape of the wood, the singular voice, and subverts them somehow by creating a setting that doesn't actually affirm the speaker and their understanding of themselves but actually instead confuses and creates a sense of tension between the speaker and the location in which they reside.

Joe: Yeah, I think that's absolutely brilliant. Oftentimes, pastoral poetry, as you've mentioned, nature serves as a presence and a force to illuminate rather than to obfuscate. And I think the way in which Frost subverts that in this poem is, one of the elements of the poem that I think is really interesting.

That sense that nature is not a force to reveal things about ourselves, but more a way in which we project our own uncertainties onto the natural world. What Frost is pointing out is that the reflection won't reveal new [00:18:00] things, it will show you your own uncertainties rather than solve them for you. 

Maiya: With a vast majority of kind of romantic, American pastoral poems. Where you look at the setting as something that offers clarity, actually the darkness and the encroaching nature of these woods is something that sits quite heavy in the poem.

I find that you have a real sense of weight, and I think that comes from the decision making, as well as the actual setting. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both, And be one traveller, long I stood, And looked down one as far as I could . To me, the speaker almost becomes part of that woods, part of that kind of dark and heavy atmosphere.

Long I stood, it is reminiscent of oak trees standing for a truly long time in these spaces. And that again adds to that lack of decision making.

Joe: Yeah, I agree, and I think, [00:19:00] again, irony is a word that often comes up when people who read this poem a lot work their way through that initial misunderstanding that we've spoken about as being very common and get to the quote unquote deeper meaning. One of the ironies of this poem is the poet appears aware of the fact that whatever decision they make they will likely regret.

Which is, you might even say a wise observation that it shows an awareness of themselves as active agents, but also the limitations of that autonomy. They don't, however, take forward the lesson from that, which is that if you are aware that whatever decision you make, you might regret and you might wish you'd done the other one, 

now, that should be a liberating force, but as you said, it only serves to darken the poet's mood.

It only serves to encroach upon him and to weigh heavily upon him. So, the narrator does 99 percent of the work here to live. a life unburdened by regret, and yet that regret feels all the heavier because of it.

Maiya: And that's a huge problem with that final line of the poem. That has [00:20:00] made all the difference. But the difference hasn't been explained. It's been complicated if anything. And you can see very evidently in public reception that the difference has been construed as completely different things dependent on the reader.

I think tone in this poem and how you read it can make a massive, massive impact. Because actually, with how vague and subtle a lot of these lines are, you know, I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence, that has made all the difference, could come across incredibly positive. It could be construed as something that has made a tangible difference in a very positive manner. And it's rare, I find in especially romantic poetry or the American pastoral tradition to find a poem that is actively lamenting its current situation.

This isn't a poem written with You know, years [00:21:00] of hindsight. This is a poem that is almost being written on the walk. The poet hasn't decided to turn back, even though he knows that in that moment he's making what feels like the wrong choice.

For you, do you think it complicates the sense of gratitude that the speaker has towards their current situation?. 

Joe: Yeah, no, I think that speaks to that sense of paralysis I mentioned earlier on, held captive by the past and future simultaneously, but I love that phrase about, , the poem lamenting its current moment. Could you speak to that a bit more? 

Maiya: For the American pastoral tradition, often, as you mentioned before, The landscape of the field or the wood is used as a method of self-reflection, something to illuminate how the speaker is actually feeling. In this poem, it does serve to darken the speaker's understanding of their own position.

And I do think it's a, it's an incredibly rare thing to witness a poem that is self-reflexive I think that the temporal suspension of this poem definitely adds to that [00:22:00] sense of misunderstanding and anxiety because you're looking at a poem that is simultaneously captive in one moment and layered with a sense of regret.

I know we argued that Frost, , in his forms isn't necessarily a transgressive poet, but I think taking the motifs he uses and, and the heaviness that he layers into this poem specifically is a truly rare experience.

I must admit the first few times I read this poem it wasn't something that I necessarily picked up on. I don't think I understood the quality of this poem on my first, let's say, five or six reads. But the more and more I read it, and the more that you can layer context through this poem, I think it makes it all the richer.

And I know that we've spoken on previous episodes about, you know, can you divorce a poem from its context? Does intention matter when the public receive it one way, you know, even [00:23:00] if the intention for this was comic, it is darkly so. I think when you explore the journey that this speaker takes and The sense of lament that I find pretty evident now reading through, I feel like this speaks more and the more I read this poem as well to almost an elegy of sorts to the decision making process, an elegy to the speaker who is feeling trapped within the confines of the yellow wood, of the, in which they can make decisions.

It really does question, for me, free will.

Joe: Absolutely. And I think poems like this often suffer from a dominant reading that is perhaps overly reductive. I mean, people think they know this poem before they read it. I mean, I'm a tutor in another life, and I often find this with teaching certain texts, that students come into a poem or a novel or a play with a very clear idea of what they're going to [00:24:00] find, and that can often make it a lot harder to find anything else.

So I think if you read this poem the way that people, you know, engage with poetry today, so I've, I mean I've seen the final stanza of this poem clipped and used on Instagram posts for example, and as you say, if you just saw those lines in isolation, you might be forgiven for thinking that it is a poem about celebrating transgressive behavior and not following the group. 

Do you think a poem like this suffers from having transgressions? An interpretation that is dominant and very simplistic. Do you think people disregard its other interpretations because there is something so clear, or do you think actually that's just, that gives readers one more thing to uncover?

Maiya: I think I'd probably fall to the latter. I think a poem is only made more interesting by a variety of interpretations, but I guess the question really is, what's more important, intention or reception. I personally find that, for this poem, that has such a wide reception, has [00:25:00] such a broad influence in, you know, even a social sphere, past just being a poem that people who are interested in poetry read, having a truly tangible social impact. When the reception so far outweighs the original intention, and I, again, I root back to if this poem was written to be a small joke between friends and has become this huge, quotable, translatable moment, I think actually I, I I would err on the side of caution with this, but I think the original meaning gets a little bit lost among it.

And how much do I think that's important? I'm not sure if I do.

Joe: No, I think I'm inclined to agree with you. I mean, like, maybe I'm contradicting myself when I was talking about , my role as a teacher, but I think as a general reader, I'm a big advocate for the fact that the moment a poem is put out into the world, it no longer belongs to the poet. And so [00:26:00] what people do with it, you might like, you might dislike, but ultimately you don't get to decide.

And I think Frost was aware of that too. I mean, there are stories of Robert Frost when he read this poem publicly, almost doing a kind of wink to the audience in which he would say things like, Don't worry, I know this one's tricky, there was a sense that he was aware that right from the off, readers may have taken the wrong interpretation.

I say wrong, you know, an interpretation was different to the one that he had envisioned. But I think he took that in his stride. And ultimately, I think I would like lots of artists to be more receptive to the fact that The legacy and the meaning of their work is not going to be dictated by then.

And, ultimately, it's probably a good thing that artists don't get to decide the way they're remembered.

Maiya: Speaking on intention, I, I do have a question for you. That might be, might be a tough one, but I mentioned it before. My personal view of this poem is that the speaker actually isn't a critical keystone to this poem. I personally find that the speaker's voice is a little bit subdued and a little bit quiet.

Do you think that's intentional? And if so, what effect do you [00:27:00] think that has on the reception of this poem? Well,

Joe: and sort of give the, sort of, the very standard interpretation of who that speaker is. Which is, you know, quite a biographical reading. But I think, I agree with you that I think the speaker's voice is far less prominent, , despite the fact the poem is purporting to be about a moment of great personal indecision. The kind of standard interpretation of this is that this is a very autobiographical poem in which the narrator is Robert Frost, perhaps Edward Thomas, but more likely Robert Frost, and that reading, which is the one that's sort of peddled for many decades, says that The poem is poking fun, or maybe suggesting that Edward Thomas wasn't decisive enough, or, wasn't forthright enough in his decision making, and that somehow this decision led Edward Thomas to enlist in the armed forces and somehow led to his death.

I don't know what you think about that. To my mind, that's a far too linear narrative. It doesn't really play into a lot of the things we've been speaking about, but [00:28:00] that's what I think about the voice with the knowledge for the listeners about the standard interpretation that's existed for many decades.

Now, to my mind, that speaks to what I mentioned earlier on about the fact that Frost is undermining the value of those individual choices. I think the reason that the voice is kind of absent in those middle stanzas is a reminder of the fact that the choice is only consequential in our own minds.

And actually history won't remember individual choices, history will remember outcomes, and how we came to those outcomes is very rarely the result of , any great philosophical decision made by any individual. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on the prominence of that voice and why you think it's not stronger throughout the poem.

Maiya: yeah, I think The subject, I, is a particularly important one. As you say, it does lose a sense of presence within the poem. You open in the first four lines, you get, I could not, I stood, I could. And then, it seems as if the [00:29:00] I sort of loses its way within that poem. I think, obviously, in, um, a reading in which you're exploring the speaker as someone who is uncertain, who is anxious, that obviously does stand to reason that the intention is to lose the eye within the scale of the poem.

That intention carries through and the message becomes very clear. However, I would particularly like to focus on the last stanza that you read at the start of our episode two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less travelled by. Now that repetition to me is particularly important and I think the reason it tracks so heavily with me is because this is the only point in the poem where you see an elongated pause. You have your semicolons, you have your full stops, your exclamation marks. Here, the poet evidently expresses that not only is this poem self reflexive as he goes through, [00:30:00] but this is almost a poetic interjection beyond the speaker. It's an eye and a reaffirmation of that eye. The repetition of that almost brings that person back into focus, brings that speaker back into focus.

and reminds me that you've lost that speaker along the way. I think the reason that the speaker's voice tracks for me as one that isn't necessarily as strong is because Frost recalls the eye, as we get to the close of the poem, at the point where arguably it's the least important. The decisions have been made, the regret has been had, the journey is in the midst of being done. And yet, the temporal suspension still allows us to remember that we're not really sure where we've come from, we don't really know where we're going. All you can feel is the weight of the incorrect decision. So for me, I think that [00:31:00] speaker, lack thereof, actually maybe evades intention a little bit. I think whether Frost intended for that speaker to get lost or not, my understanding of the poem comes from the absence, as opposed to the presence, of that speaker.

Joe: Wow, that was fabulous. I think I agree with everything you've said. I think the thing that I would like to focus on in that final stanza is it's all about how you read it. I think that there is a world in which that I pause followed by the second I is intending to imbue those lines with sort of a pompous tone.

There is a sense of trying to re establish the importance of the individual, showing that the narrator has failed to learn the lessons of the poem itself. Like I said, this poem does 99 percent of the work for the narrator, and yet the narrator fails to reach the right conclusion. The whole point of the poem is that your decisions are ultimately inconsequential.

Whatever you choose, you will regret. And whatever you don't choose, you will wish you had. And yet, they reassert the [00:32:00] value of their own, , decision making at the end. And for me, that's one of the moments of the poem where I go, Oh, I see the richly comic thing that Frost was trying to do here. And, I, think you can read that last stanza very sincerely.

You can read it in a very uplifting way. The voice that I hear is one of pomposity. And it's that pomposity for me, That is the crux of the humor in the poem. The fact that, in many ways, this is a very, very wise mediation on regret and time and decision making and the importance of the individual, but at the end of it, the narrator who has expressed all that wisdom fails to learn those lessons.

Maiya: Which makes it that much more fascinating that this poem has kind of stood the test of time as one of resilience despite taking transgressive decisions, right?

Joe: Absolutely, absolutely. And I just think Now that we've reached the end of the poem itself, as always at the end of these episodes, we want to think a little bit about the poem's afterlife. Where does this poem take Robert Frost and where [00:33:00] does the poem take us as the reader? So 

after this poem comes out in 1916 in the collection, Robert Frost becomes Mr. America in terms of poetry. As I said, he doesn't form part of this modernist tradition that is at the cutting edge of poetry. But he nevertheless remains a hugely prominent establishment figure. He's the only poet ever to have won the Pulitzer Prize, which is a very prestigious award.

On four separate occasions, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature. Get this a whopping 31 times without ever winning the award, which I believe, , I mean it must be a record. He was the first poet ever to read a poem at a presidential inauguration in 1961, which means we've gone two for two Maya on our.

inauguration poets after talking about Maya Angelou's Still I Rise in our last episode. I mean, he becomes this huge figure in the world of poetry, but I know you want to talk a little bit about a particular poet that you feel like he's shaped, and I'd like to do the same, but I'm going to hand over to you to talk about that.

Maiya: One of the poets that I'd really like to [00:34:00] touch on is, um, Jason Allen-Paisant, who I think has written, perhaps not as influenced by, but maybe more in spite of, regarding the themes that Paisant touches on. But He has this incredible collection called Thinking with Trees, and the whole collection essentially ruminates on the speaker's sense of self, and understanding who they are and where they come from whilst taking walks through the woods.

This takes place across a variety of different surfaces, Paisant, really follows a tradition of mediating on the woods as something a little bit more sinister than those romantic poets were originally intending it for. I find in a lot of Paisant's poetry, There is a similar track in the sense that the woods kind of bear witness to more of the struggles and more negative self reflections, , of the speaker , that endures these walks. For Paisant in particular, as a black man walking through these woods, he also explores a sense of ownership and right to [00:35:00] exist within certain spaces, which I think, obviously, in some ways blows Robert Frost's view out of the water. Um, as a modern poet, Paisant does an incredible job of exploring a real sense , of fully formed identity that I personally don't find in Robert Frost.

I think, you know, speaking , on that slightly more subdued voice, Paisant has taken work by poets like Edward Thomas or, or Frost and really used them as a jumping off ground to create a new sense of the pastoral. I know you also wanted to discuss about, , some slightly more mid range modern poets. Heaney was massively influenced by Robert Frost.

Joe: Yeah, Seamus Heaney for listeners who aren't aware, , was an Irish poet who did what Robert Frost couldn't do and won a Nobel Prize in literature. , obviously it's important to talk about how Heaney is writing from a very different tradition to Robert Frost, he's an Irish poet, grew up in Northern Ireland, and a lot of his poetry was influenced by the [00:36:00] violent conflict known as the Troubles.

But I think the place where I find real parallels between their work, and I think Heaney absolutely had read Robert Frost and was influenced by him, is that sense of landscape as something murky rather than something illuminatory. So, obviously, the more The more modern a poet you are the larger the poetic tradition that you're writing back against or writing in dialogue with is.

So just like Robert Frost is writing back against the American pastoral tradition and the romantic tradition, Heaney is doing the same thing with the addition of Robert Frost and all the other great 20th century poets that came before him. But the thing that I think he really gets from Frost is that sense of the natural landscape, not as something that reveals inner truths about ourselves, but something that actually forces us to contend with the aspects of our personalities that we probably wished we didn't have to.

Maiya: For sure. And, you know, poets have long mediated on landscapes to engage with their own sense of [00:37:00] moral or social, political, emotional standing. I think for a lot of these poets, Heaney, Frost, Paisant, the landscape serves to muddy the waters a little bit.

Joe: No, definitely, and I think, listeners who aren't familiar with Seamus Heaney, I would absolutely recommend they go and read some of his work, and we're actually going to be talking about one of his poems, Digging, in our next episode, but that sense of landscape as being something that is constantly being recurred and throwing up, mysteries and lessons from the past, often in the form , of poems.

very tangible and physical objects. So Seamus Heaney writes a lot about the bogs of Ireland in which literal physical manifestations of the past, corpses, bodies, fossils, are being constantly regurgitated. And I think the way in which he uses those landscapes to comment on a literary tradition that is also being reworked, reimagined, reconfigured constantly, is a really fascinating thing.

And I think there's definitely a lot of Frost in Seamus Heaney's work.

Maiya: Well I'm very excited to discuss it [00:38:00] next time and unfortunately we're coming to the end of our time today.

Joe: So, there's nothing left to say but thank you for listening and goodbye from me. 

Maiya: And goodbye from me too. . 

See you next time.