The Road Not Taken

by Robert Frost

CONTENTS

About the Author

Critical Appreciation

Other works

My Perception

About the

Author

Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29,

1963) was an American poet. His work was

initially published in England before it was

published in America. He is highly regarded for

his realistic depictions of rural life and his

command of American colloquial speech. His

work frequently employed settings from rural life

in New England in the early twentieth century,

using them to examine complex social and

philosophical themes. One of the most popular

and critically respected American poets of the

twentieth century. In 1894 he sold his first

poem, "My Butterfly. An Elegy" (published in the

November 8, 1894, edition of the New York

Independent) for $15 ($409 today).

Critical Appreciation

“The Road Not Taken” is one of Robert Frost’s most familiar and most

popular poems. It is made up of four stanzas of five lines each, and each

line has between eight and ten syllables in a roughly iambic rhythm; the

lines in each stanza rhyme in an abaab pattern. The popularity of the

poem is largely a result of the simplicity of its symbolism: The speaker

must choose between diverging paths in a wood, and he sees that choice

as a metaphor for choosing between different directions in life.

Nevertheless, for such a seemingly simple poem, it has been subject to

very different interpretations of how the speaker feels about his situation

and how the reader is to view the speaker. In 1961, Frost himself

commented that “The Road Not Taken” is “a tricky poem, very tricky.”

Frost wrote the poem in the first person, which raises the question of

whether the speaker is the poet himself or a persona, a character created

for the purposes of the poem. According to the Lawrence Thompson

biography, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (1971), Frost would often

introduce the poem in public readings by saying that the speaker was

based on his Welsh friend Edward Thomas. In Frost’s words, Thomas

was “a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go

the other.”

Other works

Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening

Birches

The Runaway

Home Burial

The Soldier

After Apple-Picking

Choose Something Like a Star

My Perception

What I like about this poem is that poet took

the road less travelled by. This shows that the

poet wanted to try something else, something

that no one has ever done. We should always

try to do something completely OUT OF THE

BOX!!, because we will never know what is

across the bend. It may be something

EXTRAORDINARY or DANGEROUS but sometimes it

is good to take a RISK. To discover

something AMAZ!NG!!

–Robert Frost

“Two roads diverged in a wood and I-

I took the one less travelled by

And that has made all the difference.”

PPT presented by: Ashley D’cruzIX-A

Delhi Public School, NashikEnglish FA2 Assignment

Assigned by: Rithu Madam

THANK YOU!!