[MUSIC] So I want to end with a little set piece. Reading and commenting on what may be just about the most well known modern American poem, Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken. Published in his book Mountain Interval in 1920. It's probably a poem many American students read in high school. They may have read it in elementary school. And it's still used as the kind of touchstone within high school and college education, and it's also misrepresented. Critics have know for decades and have argued for decades, that The Road Not Taken is not the poem that people think it is. Here it is, two roads diverged in a yellow wood. And sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth. Then took the others, as just as fair. And having perhaps the better claim because it was grassy and wanted wear. Though as for that the passing there had worm them really about the same. And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black. I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. It would be impossible to count the number of high school and college students who have been given this poem as a way of suggesting, that if they have the courage to embark upon the road less traveled by, it would enrich their lives and make all the difference. It would make their lives what they could be if they took that uncertain step. Frost however, who cultivated it the image of himself as a New England sage liked to draw people in to poems that felt like homilies, that felt reassuring, and then took the ground out from under your feet. Because this poem while it concludes with this memory of this dramatic life choice. This heroic, courageous life choice. Along the way, pretty much tells you that the roads really weren't actually very different. Both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black. So there's no actual evidence that the roads are any different when he embarks upon one rather than the other. They look pretty much the same. It begins by saying that no he can't travel both roads. He can't be one traveler and travel both roads at the same time so he looks at them as long as he can. Takes one. The other. Because really it's just as fair. Having perhaps the better claim, he says, because it was grassy and wanted wear. But by the time you get later in the poem, you realize that that's not true. That it, perhaps this is just an illusion. Though as for that the passing there had warned them really all about the same. It's a poem in the end about the illusions that people promote about themselves. About the stories they tell themselves. About what made the difference in their lives. But what the poem actually suggests is that nothing makes much of any difference, that the choices you make are either interchangeable or indistinguishable. And thus, if that's the case, the dramatic difference that you imagine they make in your life may also be nothing more than a fantasy. The speaker at the end postures self importantly, but everything that leads up to that posturing, undermines it. It's a poem that promotes radical doubt. It's the poem that promotes uncertainty. It's the poem that demolishes people's sense of self-importance. And that's a very different poem from the one that so many young people have been led to believe Frost wrote. In which if you have the courage you can shape your own life. Frost doesn't believe that's the case.
