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Be honest: what was the last contemporary poem you learnt by heart, just because it spoke directly to you? Perhaps it’s simply the case that fewer such poems are being written. Open any prize-winning collection these days, and there’s a high chance you’ll find someone banging on about themselves; a newcomer to the art form might reasonably conclude that poetry now is less about memorable truth-telling than the pained demonstration of the authenticity of the poet’s own experience. The sesquicentennial of Robert Frost, the American poet born on March 26 1874, seems a good moment to remind ourselves that poetry used to aspire to a great deal more.
Frost’s very clear idea of poetry as a public art means that his poems are about you. He knew that readers are interested in the poet’s life only insofar as it can shed light on their own. But Frost also used our perfectly natural instinct “to make it all about us” to trick us into serious misreadings of his own intentions. His poems affect to give us what we most want – comfort, logic, reassurance, familiarity, simplicity; but they are almost always far more strange, ambiguous, dark or nihilistic than they first appear.
Frost is a poet both of authentic voice and of meticulous, sly performance. His cleverest and most virtuosic trick was to naturalise his poetic speech in a way that lets it travel into the brain along the same road as the conversational. The checkpoint guards at our ear miss everything, as Frost cheerfully volunteers his paperwork, declares his animal products and chats away about the weather, while he smuggles yet another caseload of God-help-us-all over the border. But here’s where you can trust Frost: nothing he says is an accident, however casual its delivery. Indeed, you soon learn that the more throwaway a line appears, the more important it will later turn out to be.
“The Road Not Taken” has become the best-known example of Frost’s subversive tactics, yet it’s remarkable how many readers still fall into Frost’s rusty old trap, more than a century after its publication. The poem pretends to be another fireside monologue, but is really a firebombing of the false comfort of the “life is a journey” metaphor. Such is our need to make the poem mean what we want it to mean, even the title is often misquoted as “The Road Less Travelled”.
Yet the poem is not about making a bold choice at a diverging path, but retrospective justification: for our lives to have meaning, we often have to tell ourselves our decisions were both crucial and consciously our own. “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.” But did it, really? How can we know? (And nowhere, note, does Frost reassure us that the “difference” made was a good one.) The poem earlier admitted that two paths were “worn… about the same”. Your interpretation of that “sigh” will tell you a lot about yourself: what do you hear in it? Courage? Satisfaction? Resignation? Regret? Frost intended it as the sigh of a rather pompous old man, determined to see himself the master of his own fate. But our heroic journey is a distortion of the rear-view mirror.
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