29. David Orr, The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong

I bought David Orr’s The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong in Otis and Clementines, a used bookstore in Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia, which also facilitates cat adoptions and has a café. The book looked interesting for three reasons. I had recently skimmed an article about Robert Frost in The New Yorker, in which I learned about the widespread perception of Frost as a “monster,” something Orr traces to the discord between Frost and his first biographer, Lawrance Thompson, whose three-volume work is, Orr writes, “scathing toward Frost , worse . . . scathing without quite seeming to want to so.” For more than 50 years, Thompson’s version of Frost dominated thinking about the poet, as if in response to way he was lionized while he was alive. Second, I was curious about how Orr might fill an entire book—a short one, but still—with a discussion of one 20-line poem. And, finally, I was at the end of a 100-kilometre walk, and I realized “The Road Not Taken” is, at the most superficial level, a poem about a walk. That’s the context of the decision that the speaker makes between the two roads—something that would’ve been obvious to its first readers, but which we might be likely to miss since few of us walk anywhere these days. The “traveler” who chooses the road that “was grassy and wanted wear / Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same” was on foot, and the “step” that hadn’t darkened the leaves covering either road would’ve been human, had it existed. Those lines in the poem’s second and third stanzas show, as Orr notes, that the speaker’s claim to have chosen “the one less traveled by” makes little sense. Those two roads, as generations high school valedictorians and advertisers have missed, appear more or less identical, according to the speaker’s description of them.

That detail is only one of the poem’s perhaps surprising complexities. Orr works through it carefully in a chapter that’s a masterpiece of close reading. He also situates the poem within Frost’s life and particularly his friendship with the English poet Edward Thomas, who apparently provided Frost with a reason for writing it. But Orr’s take on “The Road Not Taken” goes beyond the poem itself into the idea of individual choice in America culture and the interdisciplinary field of choice, which I didn’t realize existed, and philosophical perspectives on the self. Does the self exist as a “unified, continuous entity,” as most of us experience ourselves, or is philosopher Derek Parfit’s argument “that we have no self at all, but merely an overlapping succession of mental states” closer to the truth? What role does our cultural framework play in our senses of who we are? Throughout these discussions, Orr continues bringing Frost and “The Road Not Taken” into consideration, as if Frost had anticipated them in his poem.

The book’s epilogue thinks about the crossroads as an emblem of decision-making: it’s, following anthropologist Victor Turner, a liminal space characterized by paradox, duality, performance, and metaphor—the latter both suggestive of doubleness, since a performer both is and isn’t the role they play, and “a metaphor joins two terms so that they both are and aren’t each other.” Performance and metaphor, Orr contends, are “the great engines” of Frost’s poetry, and he is thus “the great poet of the liminal,” whose “natural terrain is the unsettled intersection of opposing paths.” This is all very interesting, but Orr missteps, I think, when he tries to extend the idea of liminality to the United States as a “threshold nation” where immigrants are offered new beginnings. That’s too broad a statement, and in Trump’s America, it’s factually incorrect to say about the majority of newcomers. The exceptions are white South Africans, it seems. All others are subject to arbitrary deportation. Too bad Americans decided to take that particular road. I hope they make a different decision, collectively, at the next place where their road diverges.