He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. It is a narrative poem that describes the struggle of a central character standing on the road that has diversion and he want to choose correct path but fails to decide which one is better for him. He famously observed of free verse, which was favoured by many modernist poets, that it was ‘like playing tennis with the net down’. The poem, The Road Not Taken, is one of the famous poems written by an American poet: Robert Frost. And yet he didn’t belong to any particular movement: unlike his contemporaries William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens he was not a modernist, preferring more traditional modes and utilising a more direct and less obscure poetic language. The narrator of the poem stands at a fork in the road, where the path 'diverges in a yellow wood.' He looks down both paths, wondering which one to take, and is sorry that. Robert Frost (1874-1963) is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. In this landscape everything is dead and burnt, the sun is blotted out by ash, all plants and animals are extinct, and most humans are either lone travelers or members of cannibalistic communes. You can listen to Frost reading his poem here. The Road takes place after some unknown apocalyptic event has nearly wiped out the earth. If you found this analysis of ‘The Road Not Taken’ helpful, you can discover more about Robert Frost’s poem here. Indeed, Frost’s poem may even have been what inspired Thomas to make up his mind and finally choose which ‘road’ to follow: he chose war over America, and ‘The Road Not Taken’ is, perhaps, what forced his hand. Frost found Thomas to be an indecisive man, and after he’d written ‘The Road Not Taken’ but before it was published, he sent it to Thomas, whose indecisiveness even extended to uncertainty over whether to follow Frost to the United States or to enlist in the army and go and fight in France.įrost intended the poem to be a semi-serious mockery of people like Thomas, but it was taken more seriously by Thomas, and by countless readers since.
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