Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’: The World War I Connection

Robert Frost’s "The Road Not Taken" was composed during World War I -- The Great War -- for a friend who was fighting in France. The poem is believed to be a reflection of his friend’s angst about the choices that we have to make in life. In conversations Frost had about this poem well after the fact of writing it, he suggests that he was thinking of this friend, Edward Thomas, and the critical choices facing that friend that could mean life or death.

According to Frost (at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1953), "One stanza of "The Road Not Taken" was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England. [It] was as found three or four years later, and I couldn’t bear not to finish it. I wasn’t thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other. He was hard on himself that way. And so I . . . sent it to him in France, getting the reply, ’What are you trying to do with me?’"

This might be of particular interest to the many Vietnam Era Veterans who will remember Robert Frost as the poet reading at the inauguration of President Kennedy in 1961.

By the time John F. Kennedy was elected, wrote Professor Earl Wilcox in the introduction to his 1994 book, His ’Incalculable’ Influence on Others: Essays on Robert Frost in Our Time, "Frost was widely accepted by mass popular culture as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States."  The many accolades "suggesting his estimable place in American arts and letters were the Pulitzer Prize, awarded four times, and the distinguished Bollingen Prize for Poetry. His name appeared perennially, at least in the press, among those being nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature."

“It has become commonplace during the three decades since his death to see almost daily lines quoted or paraphrased from the poet’s most accessible poems in advertisements for computer companies ("Take the road less traveled," reads a recent advertisement), for sporting goods, for musical events, and an array of other business and cultural events. It seems obvious that Frost remains in the American consciousness in a deep and potent dimension."

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

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.