0.3 Literary Nomads for Teachers

 

Hornsby Meets Frost Meets Us

 

Did you know Bruce Hornsby had a song called “The Road Not Taken”? He wrote it back in 1988, kind of ancient days for us now. What? You didn’t know? Neither did I! Well, at least until I started preparing for this episode. 

Come on, I know you know Bruce Hornsby though. He’s that “The Way It Is” guy. The one that goes [song riff] “That’s just the way it is. Some things will never change.”  That guy.

Sorry. Well, maybe he’s right, maybe they won’t. Except that, oh, I can hear those little English educator brains whirring right now: “There’s a song called ‘The Road Not Taken’? Oh, frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” Well, before you chortle in your joy at another little attention-grabber possibility for your classrooms, settle down with your Duck-Duck-Going. I put a link to the song in the Show Notes. You can hear it all, later. That is, if you still want to after we talk today.

To hear Hornsby fans talk about it, it’s one of his best, and heck, since I now know a total of two maybe three Bruce Hornsby songs, who am I to correct them? But he does play a mean piano, and you gotta love that. 

So the guts of the Robert Frost connection is the chorus that is repeated–you know, like choruses are–

Everytime I see her face

On the street in the hollow in the bend

I see her in my mind and then

I go down the road not taken… again

It’s a pop song, so no surprise, his road not taken is a girl he lost some time in the past. Ah, the sighs! Ah, the regrets! (And, for the record, in the song, he does fit in his famous line, “Some things never change way out here,” so he switches it up a bit.)  

And what the heck? You’d be right. He wonders if, somehow, he had taken a different relationship road, stayed in Appalachia with a girl who could never leave it, is haunted by the possibility–almost overwhelmed by the possibility, in fact. And so he goes back to, you know, check it out. What does he find? I bet you know, but I’ll tell you anyway:

Oh I saw her she was sitting there

Older, thinner on the front porch

Yup. Time’s a bitch. But like most dudes who sing about past relationships this way, they never seem to notice that they’re quite a bit older now, too. Stuff changes. You can’t go home again. Time marches on. Nothing remains the same. And You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Chances are, if you have ever taught Frost’s poem—and if you haven’t, it’s surely been suggested to you at some point or another–If you’ve ever taught or had a near-miss teaching of Bobby Frost, you probably haven’t included old Bruce Hornsby alongside it. 

And you probably haven’t heard any textbook talk about the poem like I’m about to with you. And that’s because this is a podcast called Literary Nomads. We push the envelope a bit when it comes to our reading and meaning-making. We travel a bit. But today, I want to give you a taste of what this podcast is all about by working us a bit through one of the most traditional and over-burdened little poems of Americana, Frost’s “Road” etc. etc. 

Why don’t I recommend you using Bruce Hornsby in your classroom (besides the fact that this song is now 2-3x as old as most students)? And what could I possibly say about Frost that hasn’t been said a few dozen thousand times by now? Do I have a few clever lesson plans or a cool new reading acronym up my sleeve? 

Well, um, no.  Not like you’re expecting.

 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, And, today, we’re taking Robert Frost down roads he’s never taken. 

 

Frost a la Mode

Now, I don’t know you or your tastes in literature or style of teaching. I don’t know if you offer writing, speaking or literature to your students, or if it’s in a classroom or tutorial or somewhere in between. I am guessing that you are a devotee to reading, though, and that you have somewhere along the way developed some preferences for and within all of these choices. Me, too. I taught in a ton of different scenarios across 35 years and got paid for it (more fools, they!), and now I accost people at random.

But I also know that this Frost poem is one hard to escape: it’s omnipresent, what those same theys that paid me call a “classic”, and it may well be a favorite of yours. I do know that the poem is often taught as early as 6th grade, so I have to say up front, though, that whatever I talk about in Literary Nomads might be cool for adults and teachers and students all, but I generally have high school and college students in mind. 

If you’re a teacher of middle school students, you may well find a lot of ideas and approaches that can be adapted for your classrooms, but I’m working with ideas–as you’ll see today–for students who already have a few degrees of comprehension skills earned. And if you’re a student in middle school who has somehow snuck in here to listen, kudos to you, buddy. You’ve found the secret cabal where all the darkest agents of the adult world hang out and scheme against you. 

But let’s start with a basic question, whether you know this poem well or not, and whether or not you love it or–if you have some degree of literary taste–find it unpalatable, the basic question is this one of popularity. I mean, sure it’s a good enough poem, but why oh why is it everywhere and how has it come to its status as classic American canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More? 

The answer is easy enough, too, but it does give us a good place to understand our possible approaches to it. It’s American canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More because it’s easy to teach. That’s what canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More means, a “center” that we like to describe as a pillar of literary arts central to the problematic term Western civilization, but actually what makes its way into our canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More is most often about what is most “teachable,” that offers us morals and messages that match well with that problematic term Western civilization. I mean, all those monks transcribing literature back in the day did have to pick and choose what got translated and preserved. And all those teachers back in the Victorian era had only so much time and space in their own classrooms to select what felt right to raise good gentlemen and ladies. Sure, the 20th century added a good pile more onto that list, and the 21st century is already doubling-down, but you and I have to make choices between what is available to our students, what feels relevant enough to be meaningful, current enough to be high-interest, and classic enough not to stir up too much trouble. We’re today’s medieval scribes, whittling away our choices down to what delivers the most bang for our instructional buck, but you don’t need me to tell you this. Somewhere along the way, the notion of “high literature for high culture” got lost a bit. And so for a full century classrooms have been offering Robert Frost.

Didn’t I say earlier that he’s taught to 11-year-olds? (No offense to any 11 year olds out there; this is a slam on classroom tradition, not the victims trapped in it.) 

But as lame and expected a choice as this poem is, then, I want to offer you my podcast’s promise. Whether you are determined to offer any particular title we discuss to students or not, I promise to make every episode one where something new will be discovered, something new to you as teachers, and something which can be used with students, tweaked a bit to your own situation–er, sitch, is what they call it now. 

But mostly, what I do in this podcast is demonstrate an approach to reading, to connection-making, to applications of ideas to other texts and fields of study. In the realm of pedagogical standards and such, we’d call this inter-textual work, of pursuing common themes across texts. But I also am fond of philosophy, of epistemologyAny question of philosophy which addresses what we can know ... More in particular, of the phenomenology of meaning-making, that idea of reader agency, of discovering personal significance in our acts of reading, of engaging literature through writing and speaking back, of uncovering tensions, frictions, to explore, of ambiguities and ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More which power so much of what we meet, of–in short–developing critical literacy in our instruction in ways that schools have traditionally fallen short. 

Wow, that’s a thick pile of terms, but I want this episode to be a “How To” episode for you in addition to just an introduction. I want to help you understand today what I’m up to but also how you can make the best use of it. And to do that, I need you to know that I’m not offering what traditional teacher podcasts and resources deliver: handy, ready-made lesson plans. If you know anything about that thick pile of terms I just rattled off, you know that they resist what so much of our instruction demands of us: practical, measurable, objective deliverables of assessment. To put it modestly, we’re after something bigger. 

That doesn’t mean that I don’t care about you and the job you simply have to do tomorrow. But I care about what makes for effective and significant reading and literature study more. And besides, if you’re just looking for a worksheet for Of Mice and Men, Teachers Pay Teachers and other websites have them by the score. And if you’re looking for some motivational techniques or management approaches to classrooms, I gotta say that my experience has been that nothing runs a good classroom like significant reading that is relevant to our students. 

And that means moving beyond simply “delivering content” and truly empowering our students to engage critically with literature, especially amidst the pressures of curriculum, testing, and “measurables.” Especially amidst the pressures they have through social media distractions, AI-generated answers, and just . . . being young but with more worldly experiences, and different ones, from those you and I ever had. You’re here because you want to think more about what reading is, how literature works, and how you might use it for your own classroom.

So let’s get to it. Having said all of that, how could I possibly make Bobby Frost fresh and new and still interesting? To get there, we have two small hoops to jump through so we–all of us listeners and I–are on the same page. 

If you’d like a refresher on the poem and its traditional teaching, then these next two podcast chapters are for you. I’m going to give you a quick reading so we have the images fresh in our ears, and then talk a bit about what we’ve done with it this past century and why. If you’re not down with that and would rather go listen to the Bruce Hornsby song while we do that, go ahead. If your podcast player has chapters, just skip the next two to get to the “fresh stuff.” And if it doesn’t this little diversion will probably take us about 9 or 10 minutes, so just skip ahead a bit. 

…. Are they gone? Good. Now, for the rest of us, first, here’s the poem. And after that, some cool stuff that we won’t share with those impatient folks.  (Skipping my chapters . . . )

 

Reading: Frost: “The Road Not Taken”

Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken” (1915)

 

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 other, 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 worn them really about the same,

 

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, 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—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The Basics, Wrong and Less Wrong

Still not a bad little poem as, you know, simpler times America produces. It’s got a nice subtle rhyme scheme, a little ABAAB, though if you were listening you probably didn’t hear too much of that because the oral performance subdues it a bit.

When I was in middle school I saw this poster on what feels like in my memory 18 different classroom walls, a fork in the wooded road with yellowing trees and the cliched wisdom that we must all take our own paths, go our own way, be our own trailblazers, avoid doing what others do, and similar messages. Do what the great American poet Robert Frost advises: Take the Road Less Traveled. 

Ah, the individual who can go his own path and not conform, to take the road that others have not, the road that others don’t!  

It is kind of perfect Americana when put that way, commodified as it is for convenient classroom poster sales, because this country has always prided itself on that individual spirit, that triumph of the unique person who can stand above the crowds and make himself into whatever he wants (it’s almost always a “he” in that context, isn’t it? Yeah. Sexist much?). Manifest Destiny. Beacon to the World, Land of Opportunity, Home of the Brave. A place where anyone can become anything if only he work hard and rise above the rest, not follow the crowd. The American Dream.  Reason enough to hate the poem, but remember what we said about that literary canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More: whatever teaches the lessons we need to teach . . . .

So let’s quickly erase all of this nonsense, because none of that is what the poem is at all, of course. By now, surely, we all know this. Frost’s poem has a rival claim to fame: for being the most misread poem in American history. And for teachers, a new tradition rises: let’s make the students feel smart by doing a “close reading” of the poem to discover that the non-conformity theme is ridiculous. 

We could do far worse. But maybe this is what happens when we get caught up in making things teachable, we sometimes lose control. The message we want to teach becomes tradition, more important than the text itself. I mean, readers can find their own significance in a text, but this was something quite different. This was, for a long time, an entire culture which had stopped looking at what was on the page.  And if you experienced this debunking lesson yourself or delivered it, let’s put a pin in that experience and its motivation, because I’m going to come back to that. 

But do me a favor: if you can still find one of those non-conformity posters out there, snap a pic and send it to me. Then give it to your students for a sacrificial ritual and send a pic of that, too.

In the meantime, we wisely taught the better meaning. We point out that the two roads he is facing “equally lay” before him, and one has a claim “just as fair” as the other. No, the “real” meaning of the poem is the one more about that stuff at the end, what our speaker will think of his choice in the future. He says:

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—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 

Our speaker wonders about choice and consequence. Once we decide to go one direction, we may never know what our lives might have been had we chosen differently. Our choices have consequences. Our choices may even have regrets attached to them. And so our sigh, a sigh of regret and poignant piano solos worthy of any Bruce Hornsby ditty. I’ll give this to him: he had the right kind of literature teacher, one who debunked the Frost misreading and taught him well, that we wonder and get all angsty over our past choices. “That’s just the way it is.” And he learned, whether or not he was taught this, that Bobby Frost’s sigh was one of regret.

Truth is, though, our speaker offers just a couple of images that might intimate his feelings about it, right? The first is the “sigh” when he will tell the story later, but is that a sigh of regret? Or is it a sigh of understanding? Or even a sigh of happiness? We don’t know. The second place is the last line: “And that has made all the difference.” And of course, yes, life is different from the way it might be had you chosen the other path. But he specifically doesn’t say better or worse here. Just “different.” I bring these up because I notice, as I’m sure you do, that it’s hard to compare a path taken from one not, since we don’t know if the untraveled path would have been better or worse. 

It may be at this point that our teachers claim this is about “regret” at least for not knowing, for wondering what life might have been had he chosen differently, had any of us when we encounter choices. There are always regrets and wonder later. I was once offered a job to teach in a castle on the Basra river in Istanbul, and I turned it down. Do I wonder? Well, yeah, but you’re not catching me writing any song about it. Because I personally have a different sensibility about choice than such a pithy answer like “regret” offers.

But I’ll also mention that we might potentially have another misreading here. And I want to key in later on this idea of poetic details that are missing. If Frost had an emotion in mind for us, why didn’t he offer us even a smidgen more to nail it down?

But we’ve covered what most teachers have always said about the poem, this “regret” reading or perhaps this ambiguous one. One of my teachers actually used the poem to teach the term “ambiguity.” Okey-dokey. 

And then, one of two phenomena tend to appear, which I find interesting. We either do a quick pedagogical shrug of the shoulders, perhaps with a little quiz attached, and move on, because–you know, we’ve covered the content and there’s still quite a bit more to fit in this week, especially with that fire drill on Thursday, dammit. Or, we really want to underscore for our students the literary significance of this moment, so we build up this theme a bit more: we ask students to reflect on the importance of their choices for the future, to think more about how time and regret work, or even, if we’re feeling a bit saucy, how our speaker builds that choice up in the future into something bigger than it actually was. He even comes up with a name for the road he missed, “the road less traveled by,” and then calls it significant, how it made “all the difference.” 

And there we leave it, almost suitable for Shmoop. All about a guy who was out walking one morning and came on two paths, and suddenly he’s picturing himself in the future heaving and sighing over it. Yeah, you know, maybe my Turkish school job would have been cool and it probably would have altered my life in such a way that I wouldn’t be doing this talk with you now, but how do I know that another choice–say, how I grabbed a blackberry jam for my toast this morning instead of the grape–didn’t alter my life, too? 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two jams arrived for my cafe toast and I—

I took the fruit less eaten on rye,

And that has made all the difference.

Truth is, grape doesn’t belong on rye toast, either.

 

Unresolved TensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More

Okay, so in about 10 minutes we’ve covered the past 100 years of teaching of this poem. I wonder if old Bobby Frost knew that this was going to happen. It’s a teachable poem, and the more we teach the poem across the generations, the more we all know it, which means that it literally joins the Great CanonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More in the Sky idea. Is it great literature that finds its way into the school, or is it school that makes literature great?

But now you’re figuratively and literally shifting in your seats, because you know the time has come for me to unveil a meaning for the poem that you had not heard before. And worry not. I won’t renege on my promise. 

And before I dramatically unveil a new reading–and there must be some drama to the event–I should point out that I have produced two other intro episodes to this podcast and poem than this one. I made one for general readers and one for students. If you’ve already heard them, then you probably wonder how much more could be said. But if you haven’t and you’re looking for other interpretations besides today’s, go give them a listen. Outside of a few repeated passages about the podcast itself and how it works, the Frost stuff is new. 

Specifically, I’ve talked about our speaker’s self-deception later, how he rationalizes his choice in retrospect. I’ve also discussed how he could find “all the difference” in a kind of presentism, a moment when he can set aside all reason and really feel the uninfluenced weight and power of the human ability to choose. That was in the Reader episode. For the student episode, I explored that same self-deception as instead an act of inflated ego, of his own melodramatic language in the final stanza that all of us use in rationalizing our choices, but also we addressed the philosophy of William James and his “will to believe,” that when confronted with rationally equal choices, we must exert our own belief in the significance of the choice. In other words, it’s the human act of constructing meaning. I, um, might have also mentioned that the scene of the fork in the road looks like a big letter “Y” which is basically the poem’s big question: “Why?” and the possibility that the speaker is time-traveling because he is literally telling us about the path choice that he predicts he will be telling us in the future. So, yeah.

My point is that one of the biggest problems we run into with Frost’s poem is its ambiguity, its undecidability. At its heart, it isn’t about non-conformity or even simply about regret or wondering about that past choice, no matter how long Bruce sings that it is. We all know this at some level, but are kind of scared of its classroom consequences: there isn’t really a single meaning that we can deliver about this poem to students. And we become a bit paralyzed about what to do with it. My sophomore high school teacher was quite satisfied to conclude our discussion knowing that we had learned the vocabulary word “ambiguity,” and then left it there. Because, let’s face it, when meaning is ambiguous, we can’t really test its meaning on Friday, and we are frightened for our students daring to embrace such a lesson while writing an essay on it. Ugh. That thesis sentence suddenly sounds like a vapid mess, and while trying to defend it we wait for the dreaded conclusion: “a poem can mean anything,” or “we can never know what Frost meant,” or “the poem has no meaning at all.” Gah, we know we’re about to be fired. 

Because, yes, such statements play right into student prejudice against literature in the first place. If interpreting literature is subjective, therefore there is no meaning to be defended or every single interpretation is equally true and they can therefore never be marked wrong. And yes, we teachers are therefore doomed. And so we have assembled an enormous pile of practical exercises in interpretation to shore up our defenses. 

If we’re particularly anxious, we discover some historical facts outside of the poem itself to show students that the poem is really a big joke on Frost’s friend Edward Thomas who was always unable to make decisions without getting all angsty over them, something I talk more about in the Literary Nomads for Readers episode. And of course, this is seeking answers outside of the text, a problematic approach because it teaches students to always go looking for the author’s intention, what the writer “was trying to say.” Yeughhh.  

Or maybe we double down on close readings, and demand students stay with the text itself, just like good AP students would. Now I’ve taught AP Literature for 20 years and have been trained in IB and taught ToK along the way. I understand the Modernist and New Critical approach to literature (thank you, T.S. Eliot, my hero!), and it has saved me more than a few times when my students fell to the dangers of relativism in their reading. “Show me,” I intoned much like an angry Gandalf, “the textual evidence!” Because, you know, we were preparing for a great big test and it was largely multiple choice and a rubric that somehow had numerical points attached to it. 

Yes, I can hear us all cry in agreement and simultaneous despair, there is a gulf between the demands for assessment and the work of meaning-making from language. It’s not resolvable, and besides, my students this year aren’t ready to do more than careful text analysis, anyway. I’m happy if they can pull that off.

I gotcha. 

But can I ask. You’re happy if they can pull off textual analysis, putting objective evidence to their interpretations. It’s definitely a vital skill. Are they happy? I guess I mean, what do we do with them if they come up to us and offer one of these more ambiguous interpretations or wonder at what the poem could possibly mean when Frost has made it clear? And you know what they do. The same thing we do: they go looking for an objective “answer” to the meaning onceuponatime through Shmoop or LitCharts or Project Muse, now just through their favorite AI bot. And then we try to stop them because they cheated in finding an “objective answer” that we wanted them to find themselves, all while knowing–knowing–that poetry operates on different principles than objectivity, that this is all a game created for us by public schools which have given us Robert Frost to study in the first place.

And we don’t have to have this fight.

But we’ve come to one of the main motivations for this podcast, and I want to be transparent about it. I spent my career with this issue through all kinds of manifestations of it. And I’ve found ways through, because you and I both know that whether we get to the larger discussions about literature which are out there, our students are meeting these challenges in other places. Sure, it might not be Frost, but something less significant in its ambiguity like a decision about how to interpret our neighbors, or political rhetoric, or what actions in their own careers will leave them fulfilled. About where to place their empathy, about how to prioritize their time, about how to think about their relationships. These are the questions and passions which drew us to literature in the first place, and we can be excited about textual analysis–it’s a powerful revealer of meaning–but it never quite hits those big questions.

And the standards we meet so often find the weakest methods of naming them. When I was teaching, the concept of theme was reduced to the phrase “Big Idea,” and we were lauded for finding “companion texts” to supplement our main curriculum anchor texts, but we’ve rarely been offered insight in how to make those inter-textual connections relevant, let alone personally significant. 

And our students are ready for those discussions—or at least, they’re encountering the questions right now, and they’re not always well-equipped to understand them. They’re ready for that level of questioning even when they aren’t ready to parse their sentences. It’s not that we need to make room in our packed curricula to “cover” more material. It’s got to be about how and what we ask, how we frame, that same material, and if there’s more room to be made, it’s in legitimizing their questions and investigations.

So let’s model some of that questioning. Ourselves. 

Aporia

So let’s start by embracing the idea that Frost’s simple poem actually leads us to difficult and even unanswerable places. There are meanings which we simply cannot be certain of, and leading students to the discovery of these can be frustrating, but also hugely important for them.

Now, personally, I’m a bit of a fanboy for Jacques Derrida, though I can’t pretend to understand everything he’s said, nor can I expect to bring all of my students to the concept of deconstructionJacques Derrida is a founding voice. Since there is no knowl... More. That gets to grad-school level geekdom to take up seriously. 

But let’s point out a couple of places in the poem where we find spaces, gaps, in meaning, a contradiction or tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More that resists our understanding. The first is the obvious one: is it that there are two fairly equal roads there or that one is less traveled? The speaker says both. We also have, or perhaps an answer to the first problem, that our speaker is a big fat liar. He has an arbitrary choice and then he says without clarification that he will lie that the choice is equal, that he will instead in the future call it significant. And let’s be clear enough about this: Frost did this; it’s no accident of bad writing going on here, at least likely not. He’s created an unanswerable space between his speaker in the present and future; he’s failed to describe what the future speaker will actually feel, but then more ambiguously claims that “that”–whatever that is, will make all the difference.

We also have the little fun of the title itself, which names the road he does not take. We don’t know what’s down that road, and neither does our speaker. None of us will ever know. But that, that “unknown” or absence, is the title of the poem, what the poem is likely about: what we do not know. Nor do we know absolutely how he chose one path over another, but we do know that he will later lie about the reason. Chance? Intuition? James’s “will to believe”? And, of course, the “sigh” which is something of the poem’s emotional center, but itself is . . . well, non-specific.

Now, I know that we–in our traditional application of teaching this poem—have answered these questions either to our quick lesson-length satisfaction, or we have shrugged them aside a bit if our students have asked about them. We might have been mysterious with our response: “Hmm. Could be.” Or we might have been disciplinary: “What does the text tell us?” Or merely disinterested: “Huh. I guess Frost leaves that for us to decide.”

And while I could at least make a decent case for pursuing those last two responses, there’s yet another approach which I would like to, advisedly, bring to the ‘center’ of our attention: that the poem openly denies our knowing, even brazenly places that not-knowing at its heart.

This place of indeterminacy, this idea that we readers can only penetrate so far, that there is a point, which we can arrive at in almost any piece of literature but which seems to have a clear enough demonstration here, has a literary name. It’s called aporia. “Poria” or “poros” means ‘passage,’ so aporia is a place in meaning-making which is “impassable.” 

This is not a “leaves it up to us to decide.” This is a blockade. It works to frustrate, to deny. It absolutely prevents us from achieving a single, fixed, absolute meaning in a poem. We don’t often teach it in schools for a whole bunch of reasons: you can’t test it, it sounds hard and scary, it leaves content-master teachers in a place of vulnerability–they, too, don’t know—and it risks frustrating newer readers who want to know if they have succeeded in “getting the meaning.” 

And yes, it is absolutely all of those things, because it depends upon the opposite of the transactional economy of schooling: tell me what you know and we return you grades.

But, for a moment, let’s recognize that this uncertainty is here before us. The very first thing this does for students is offer the idea that there is no single stable meaning to be found. If you prefer a gentler way to say this, try: “In some reading, the idea which we cannot find is part of the poem’s point.” We can make some textual sense of what is before us, at least to some degree of community or classroom agreement, but then we also agree that we have run into this impassable space. 

What a wonderful moment! Because it is at these places where art might erupt into its power, that we discover complexity and polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More, that we trip in our understanding and stumble into something heedlessly, that we meet experience: and there’s nothing tidy about that. Way back in 1969, John Durham said that uncertainty is one of the virtues of Frost’s poetry. Looking for definite single answers where none is possible is a sign of weakness; but meeting the complexity of experience, of uncertainty, and enduring it? (I did an episode on this very issue, Uncertainty, back in Journey 5 of the podcast, while talking about Andrew Marvell.)

But I want to move on, and a lot of the larger podcast explores these issues. So let’s leave this space with another advantage of it: it provokes us to open ourselves to more philosophical questions. We stand at a place of dilemma, where two roads diverge, and we wonder how we choose (not what we choose), we consider where we fall in the act of interpreting itself. These roads aren’t equal: one leaves us on a dark untraveled road, the other to places we’ve by now already seen.

All very good, but look Steve, it won’t work in a classroom. Fine. Let’s teach the word ‘aporia’ as a transaction, in our bank of literary terms, so we make it possible for a thesis sentence like this:

“Frost’s speaker lies about the scene, is vague about his feelings, forcing readers into a state of aporia, where the unknown road he has never ‘trodden black’ is denied to all of us.”

 

Darker Cynicism

And maybe you’re not a “just the text, ma’am, nothing but the text” kinda reader, anyway. Okey-dokey. We’ll start by asking the inevitable student question: “What was the author trying to say?” And yes, the pedant in us wants to scream: “He’s not trying to do anything; he wrote it!”

But Frost himself mused that most readers would never understand his “Road,” that not more than half a dozen total readers would ever understand “who was hit and where he was hit” by the poem. Challenge accepted, Bobby.

Frost wasn’t the best at farming; and he was teaching off and on in New Hampshire. But then he traveled to England and made friends and found support with a number of poets, like Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas. Published his first two books there. And, rather than return to the US just to resume teaching, he chose to raise his young family on a new farm while he wrote as a career. Gutsy. It was 1915. And he wrote “The Road Not Taken” which would appear in his third book. Let’s boil this down. This book needed to succeed. Frost needed money.

And so he writes a simple poem, first for the Atlantic Monthly to prove its salable value, and then to open the new collection. It’s a hit. And why? Because it catered to a publishing market that was interested only in cliches and sentiment. And Frost, needing a paycheck, wrote to sell. 

I mean, really, come on. You and I both know that it’s pretty predictable and even cheesy: simple, comfortable short lines and rhyme scheme, nothing really surprising in its sober tone of description, the famous fork in the road. He didn’t invent that idea! You and I sometimes wonder, perhaps, why we can’t look at better poems–I don’t know, more “interesting” ones–and that’s because this poem was just as predictably trite then as it is now. Geesh, this is an American public that’s been raised on the stories of O. Henry. Of course they ate this stuff up!  And Frost, who to his credit had just as much taste as we do, wrote something akin to a Lifetime channel movie.

Except. . . not quite. Because it’s quite possible that he resented this whole business, and after working with folks like Ezra Pound, I certainly might. And he did say that stuff about nobody really getting it. And we have already found some problematic moments in the poem, so . . . 

Maybe he’s mocking us. No, I don’t mean mocking Edward Thomas, which may also be true. But the rest of us, we unsophisticated readers. Critic Robert Lentricchia pretty famously has called the poem “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Now Lentricchia was mostly talking about what we’ve already touched upon earlier. That popular culture looks at the last lines of “road less traveled” and turns the poem into the American virtue of individualism. And the real meaning is in the contradiction between the real and the future lie: that really, there is nothing rational about choice. In a world going to war, in a society being eaten by machines, life-changing moments are mostly chaos; we are, pretty basically, out of control and telling lies about it. Grim, but it makes more sense in anticipating the emerging modernist outlook. Virginia Woolf had already named it. 

Easy enough. But let’s make this little historicist take more cynical still. Look at that last stanza again: 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Now imagine that this is not a poem literally about the woods and road flatware, but about Frost talking about his own future career, a prophecy of his future success against a market that he despised. He wouldn’t be the first writer to subvert the publishing industry in this way, to speak of the roads he might have chosen in the creation of his art, but that he chose to write and make money even while only ironically catering to public sentiment. 

You resist this idea. That’s fine. But when I told you earlier that Bruce Hornsby had written a song called “The Road Not Taken,” did any part of you–even a little bit–want to go look it up, wondering if you could use it somewhere? And, don’t you think old Bruce knew you might? 

What’s the line he says famously and in that song? I gave it to you before: “Some things will never change.”

Over My Abjections

At this point, it’s likely you see me as much as an agent for chaos than one for sound pedagogy and literary takeaways. I plead guilty only in that, like Frost, I believe the stories we tell later to tidy up are merely covers for more complicated, messy ideas. And that “sound pedagogy” sounds a bit like “best practices” which itself often alludes to “measurable results” which are supplied by “standardized assessments.” And, at the risk of sounding like a broken record there, I’ll leave off and say that I’ve already warned everyone that tidy “literary takeaways” are antithetical to what art does.

But if we can separate the pedagogy from the malpractice for a minute, I will defend some pretty solid pedagogical philosophy which has powered much of my career and writing and now podcasting. (How did all those P’s get in there?)

We have a prejudice in us, as teachers, as what Helene Cixous called us in warning, “masters of the craft.” (She was ultimately referring to the patriarchal language of mastery which even women have adopted, in her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Good reading there.) But to that prejudice: it’s a summary executioner-style capacity to reject. If we’re practitioners in classrooms, we tend to reject anything that isn’t immediately viable for practice. If we’re traditionalists, we reject that post-structural semiotic nonsense that leads to a void of relativism. If we’re teachers with a penchant for pop culture, we tend to reject all that dead old white guy stuff and so won’t dig up Frost if you paid us, anyway. I’d like to suppose, if we can for a moment or two longer, suggest that these rejections are kin, related to, the concept of horror.

Since it’s unlikely I will return to “The Road Not Taken” myself for quite a while, then, I want to bring us finally to French philosopher Julia Kristeva and her Theory of the Abject. That would be the word “object” but with an “a,” abject. The Abject is something horrible, the worst of experiences, that which we are horrified to witness or meet. And so, like any respectable taboo, we see its exclusion from our world of Order and tidiness as essential, a necessity. 

Let’s put this another way. Order, control, is the space where we have formed meaning, is the place of comfort, where the world makes sense; it’s the narratives we write, you know, after the experience. And anything outside of that Order, that which we have excluded, is removed because it threatens that order, that system of meaning, that identity. Meaning collapses. There is chaos. Horror. But it’s still out there, isn’t it? That monstrous thing that doesn’t belong? It’s always threatening to re-emerge; it even haunts us. 

This is Kristeva’s Theory of the Abject, that idea of the thing out there. Kristeva mentions a corpse as one of the ultimate objects which fits the conception. She says that it is a “border which encroaches on everything.”  Whew, there’s a lot there, isn’t there? But I’ve already kept you too long, so I’ll have to save more exploration of Kristeva for the larger podcast.

But consider Frost. His poetry is all about these speakers who are builders, dejects, who mend fences and walls, who walk streets and woods drawing boundaries against what they won’t confront: the seductions of the woods, the terrors of desert places. They know that the abject is inside of them, too. “I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself.” Oh, yes. And often the speakers resist this horror with language, with invented reasons for the rejection: “I have promises to keep,” or even creating metaphors for it or just naming it in order to control it: “my own desert places.”  Hmph. So do we all, I guess, devise what we can to hold those horrors at bay. There’s work to be done, after all. Miles to go before we sleep.

Take that cynical read of the dark chaos of choice of roads in the woods I offered a couple of minutes ago. Our speaker could face that choice and the utter irrationality of it. There is simply no pro / con list that will help him make a practical decision. Or, he could make it into something which fits his idea of meaning, of purpose, even. It’s a defense mechanism, a protective act. Rather than face it, he builds a false narrative. “I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.”

Put another way, he creates a “work of knowing,” of simple, clear meaning which is a lie, but which comes about because he has met the “work of not knowing.” 

What do students need to understand about literature and reading, about meaning-making, about art, about ourselves as users of language? 

Critical Shifts

One of my favorite responses to student ideas in the classroom: “Yes, and . . . who can say more?”

On this podcast, reading is about us engaging the moment with the books we meet, working with them and discovering for ourselves what they mean for us. And that can be highly personal, but it can also mean meanings found through our classroom communities who share their understandings and how they found them. 

But this also takes time, time to understand how and from where or why these meanings arise. What produced them. And how do they connect powerfully with the next reading, and the next one down that road. 

Unlike any single class lesson, Literary Nomads is not simply stand-alone episodes, but episodes which link everything together on a longer journey. We’ll spend less than an hour each week exploring titles and ideas, but then we’ll carry those ideas with us to the next stop. I don’t do podcast seasons, but I have “Journeys,” or paths we walk together for some time before changing focus. For instance, Journey 5, about Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress,” was almost 20 episodes by the time we discovered about a dozen or so texts related to the poem. Even so, most episodes will review what we’ve already discussed, so you can drop in at just about any place and feel caught up pretty soon. 

And finally, our journeys will travel pretty far, not just in interpretation, but in philosophy, the acts of writing and bringing our voices into community, into finding the significances for our choices. We’ll look at literature across genre and time, from writers across the world–I will definitely be choosing titles and ideas that will make you challenge their value for comfortable classroom talk. But I insist that we as educators make those journeys of discomfort alongside them, to discover with them, co-explorers. Reading is reading, it’s something we do, not something that happens to us. 

And while my episodes do not always explicitly talk about classrooms and pedagogy, I always have this in mind, and my Journeys are themselves not instruction in teaching, but demonstrations of examination and practice. I invite you to listen and argue, experiment and adapt, download resources I offer through our journeys, and grab the transcripts for episodes, too. It’s all free and the copyrights are creative commons for educators of all kinds.

So there you have it, a taste of what I’m up to with this podcast, and two other intro episodes lurking nearby if you still want to hear more about this Frost poem and what it does. If not, dive in, just about anywhere. The old episodes are only old by date–everything is evergreen with a literary podcast, so if you see an author or title in the archives you want to hear about, I encourage you to go give it a listen.

If I’ve caught you already and you’re ready to try the podcast, awesome. And if you’re really curious, head on over to the Waywords Studio website for other programs and content I offer along with a newsletter that covers my projects, thinking, and approaches to reading. You’ll find a link in the Show Notes. 

Thanks for checking it out, for listening this far. And until we connect again, do something that will make a difference. 

Go read something.  Something risky.

 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonuses, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

Bibliography

Al-Jumaily, Ahmad Satam Hamad . “A Deconstructive Study in Robert Frost’s Poem: The Road Not Taken.” Journal of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, vol. 33, no. 16, 2017, www.iiste.org.

Durham, John M. “Robert Frost: A Bleak, Darkly Realistic Poet.” Revista de Letras, vol. 12, 1969, pp. 57–89. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27666084. 

Liebman, Sheldon W. “Robert Frost: On the Dialectics of Poetry.” American Literature, vol. 52, no. 2, 1980, pp. 264–78. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2924816. 

Norwood, Kyle . “The Work of Not Knowing: Robert Frost and the Abject.” Southwest Review, vol. 78, no. 1, 1993, pp. 57–72. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43471468. 

Orr, David. “The Most Misread Poem in America.” The Paris Review, 11 Sep. 2015, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-in-america/.

Savoie, John. “A Poet’s Quarrel: Jamesian Pragmatism and Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken.’” The New England Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 1, 2004, pp. 5–24. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1559684. 

Subedi, Kumar Chandra . The Indeterminacy: A Deconstructionist Study of Frost Poetry. Dissertation. Tribhuvan University, P.N. Campus, Pokhara , Apr. 2009.

Zubizarreta, John. “Teaching Robert Frost.” The Robert Frost Review, no. 10, 2000, pp. 69–74. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24727291.