The options “blur and merge,” Orr writes they are “like overlapping ghosts.” As he evocatively puts it, “Two potential poems revolve around each other, separating and overlapping like clouds in a way that leaves neither reading perfectly visible.” It might have changed him deeply, it might not have. His decision might have been arbitrary, it might have been meaningful. It doesn’t accept or reject its myth of choice but sets us up to feel the tensions involved in having to choose, as if each reader were the traveler. Yet according to the corrective that David Orr offers in “The Road Not Taken,” his new book-length analysis, the poem is neither an ode nor a dark joke but somehow both at once. It was an arbitrary choice, this national myth of choosing independently and bravely and becoming the sum of your choices or finding yourself. The other looked as grassy, as trodden, as easy or hard or distinctive. The traveler hasn’t been changed by his choice of a long and lonely road, but tells us that he’s going to tell that story when he’s older, even though he had no particular reason to choose the road he took. As interpreted in The New Yorker or “Orange Is the New Black,” the poem is not in fact an ode to individualism but a joke at the expense of individualist hokum. Most of us have also heard the story that says this is all bunk. That poem is “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost, and its subject is familiar to most of us who attended an American or a Yankophilic middle school at some point in the last century: A traveler comes to a fork in the woods and, after sweating over his direction in life, takes the road less traveled, and it makes all the difference. David Orr has written the best popular explanation to date of the most popular poem in American history.
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