In the book’s most exciting sections, Orr uses a powerful critical tool: the counterfactual. Orr doesn’t need neuroscience to make Frost’s work sexy his own analysis – lucid, intelligent, and persuasive – is enough. (Orr is a poetry critic for The New York Times.) The middle section in particular relies far too heavily on summaries of cognitive science research. Parts of "The Road Not Taken" are a bit thin, as if it were a magazine article stretched out to book length. Do we make decisions for ourselves, or are our lives determined by forces-historical and cognitive-beyond us? “American optimism,” Orr writes, “is rooted in American confidence in individual decision making,” and this poem, above all else, embodies the philosophical problem of choice. The book’s final two sections show why “The Road Not Taken” has resonated so powerfully within American culture. In one reading of the poem, Frost offers “a salute to can-do individualism” in the other, he offers “a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our lives.” As Orr puts it, the speaker claims that his decision “made ‘all the difference’ only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices.” In the more sophisticated, ironic reading, however, the poem satirizes this heroic vision of the self.Īt the beginning of the poem, after all, we are told that the two roads aren’t all that different. In the more popular, naïve reading, “The Road Not Taken” is “a paean to triumphant self-assertion,” a celebration of the speaker’s choice to boldly go where few men have gone before. Orr’s interest lies less in the frequency with which these lines are quoted than in the contradictory interpretations to which they have given rise. In The Road Not Taken, critic David Orr argues that Robert Frost’s oft-quoted poem about two paths diverging in a yellow wood remains so powerful precisely because it remains so ambiguous, and that the differing interpretations this ambiguity has allowed for tell us many things-not just about Frost’s poem but about American culture and what it means to be a modern self.Ĭiting the frequency of Google searches as evidence, Orr argues that Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” “may be the most popular piece of literature ever written by an American.” In particular, the poem’s final three lines – “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” – are recited by schoolchildren, parroted by politicians, and intoned in commercials.
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