“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost (post 3): Rather than “a put-up job,” such as mocking friend’s indecisiveness, Frost got poem from his voices.

Scholars familiar with Lawrance Thompson’s biography of Frost may cite the following as the origin and meaning of “The Road Not Taken”:

“Frost was familiar with all the unavoidable excruciations through which [his friend Edward Thomas] went each time he was required to make a choice…Teasing gently, [Frost] accused Thomas of being such a romantic that he enjoyed crying over what might have been. After one of their best flower-gathering walks, he had said to Thomas, ‘No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another.’ ” After completing the poem, Frost mailed a copy to Thomas, but Thomas didn’t get the joke (1, pp. 87-89).

However neat the above scenario, it is at odds with what the same biography quotes Frost as saying about his creative process:

“A poem is never a put-up job so to speak. It begins with a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness…” Only later does a poem find its thought or meaning. “Let’s say again: A poem particularly must not begin thought first…” (1, p. 65).

So Frost would not have written “The Road Not Taken” based on an idea, any idea, including the idea of mocking his friend’s indecisiveness. That would have been “a put-up job so to speak.” However, once the poem had been written, Frost realized that it embodied the indecisiveness of his friend, at least for Frost, personally. His friend’s indecisiveness had not been the basis of the poem, but was now Frost’s personal interpretation.

It must not be forgotten, as I noted in my previous post, that Frost heard voices all his life. And as Frost says, “I hear everything I write. All poetry is to me first a matter of sound. I hear my things spoken” (1, p. 68).

1. Lawrance Thompson. Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph 1915-1938. New York, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1970.