The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong

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 O...