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The Road Not Taken
David Orr
Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong
Penguin Books
August 2016
On Sale: August 16, 2016
192 pages
ISBN: 014310957X
EAN: 9780143109570
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction
A cultural “biography” of Robert Frost’s beloved poem,
arguably the most popular piece of American literature “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . .” One hundred years after its first publication in August
1915, Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is so
ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget that it is, in fact, a
poem. Yet poetry it is, and Frost’s immortal lines remain
unbelievably popular. And yet in spite of this devotion,
almost everyone gets the poem hopelessly wrong. David Orr’s The Road Not Taken dives directly into
the controversy, illuminating the poem’s enduring greatness
while revealing its mystifying contradictions. Widely
admired as the poetry columnist for the New York
Times Book Review, Orr is the perfect guide for lay
readers and experts alike. Orr offers a lively look at the
poem’s cultural influence, its artistic complexity, and its
historical journey from the margins of the First World War
all the way to its canonical place today as a true
masterpiece of American literature. “The Road Not Taken” seems straightforward: a nameless
traveler is faced with a choice: two paths forward, with
only one to walk. And everyone remembers the traveler taking
“the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the
difference.” But for a century readers and critics have
fought bitterly over what the poem really says. Is it a
paean to triumphant self-assertion, where an individual
boldly chooses to live outside conformity? Or a biting
commentary on human self-deception, where a person chooses
between identical roads and yet later romanticizes the
decision as life altering? What Orr artfully reveals is that the poem speaks to both
of these impulses, and all the possibilities that lie
between them. The poem gives us a portrait of choice without
making a decision itself. And in this, “The Road Not Taken”
is distinctively American, for the United States is the
country of choice in all its ambiguous splendor. Published for the poem’s centennial—along with a new Penguin
Classics Deluxe Edition of Frost’s poems, edited and
introduced by Orr himself—The Road Not Taken is a
treasure for all readers, a triumph of artistic exploration
and cultural investigation that sings with its own
unforgettably poetic voice.
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