Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.

 

According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

 

In this it strongly resembles its creator. Frost is the only major literary figure in American history with two distinct audiences, one of which regularly assumes that the other has been deceived. The first audience is relatively small and consists of poetry devotees, most of whom inhabit the art form’s academic subculture. For these readers, Frost is a mainstay of syllabi and seminars, and a regular subject of scholarly articles (though he falls well short of inspiring the interest that Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens enjoy). He’s considered bleak, dark, complex, and manipulative; a genuine poet’s poet, not a historical artifact like Longfellow or a folk balladeer like Carl Sandburg. While Frost isn’t the most esteemed of the early twentieth-century poets, very few dedicated poetry readers talk about him as if he wrote greeting card verse.

But is this view of “The Road Not Taken” and its creator entirely accurate? Poems, after all, aren’t arguments—they are to be interpreted, not proven, and that process of interpretation admits a range of possibilities, some supported by diction, some by tone, some by quirks of form and structure. Certainly it’s wrong to say that “The Road Not Taken” is a straightforward and sentimental celebration of individualism: this interpretation is contradicted by the poem’s own lines. Yet it’s also not quite right to say that the poem is merely a knowing literary joke disguised as shopworn magazine verse that has somehow managed to fool millions of readers for a hundred years. A role too artfully assumed ceases to become a role and instead becomes a species of identity—an observation equally true of Robert Frost himself. One of Frost’s greatest advocates, the scholar Richard Poirier, has written with regard to Frost’s recognition among ordinary readers that “there is no point trying to explain the popularity away, as if it were a misconception prompted by a pose.” By the same token, there is no point in trying to explain away the general misreadings of “The Road Not Taken,” as if they were a mistake encouraged by a fraud. The poem both is and isn’t about individualism, and it both is and isn’t about rationalization. It isn’t a wolf in sheep’s clothing so much as a wolf that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is also a wolf. It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.

But what makes it so difficult for Obama to understand is the former president’s unwavering commitment to progressivism. Soon after the election, Obama wondered if he was just ahead of the times and “pushed too far.” He did not question whether he was right or wrong, but whether he just pressed too far too fast and did not prepare for the fact that “people just want to fall back into their tribe.” Obama’s self-understanding of himself advancing fearlessly while ordinary Americans retreat behind walls reflects his earlier comment that his political opponents “cling to guns and religion” rather than embrace the unyielding, necessary march of history forward. He cannot imagine that history swerves, circles back, or even that it has no direction. Despite his own recognition that fortunetellers of the end of history were wrong, Obama’s progressivism blinds him to a true historical sensibility.

Obama’s republicanism has no place for real human beings. He recognizes and tallies the cost of globalization and economic change. They shut down plants and threaten civic and cultural solidarity. They lead, in his words, to many Americans’ “fears that economic security was slipping away, that their social status and privileges were eroding, that their cultural identities were being threatened by outsiders, somebody that didn’t look like them or sound like them or pray as they did.” He recognizes that the technocratic and capitalist global elite made their decisions “without reference to notions of human solidarity – or a ground-level understanding of the consequences that will be felt by particular people in particular communities by the decisions that are made. And from their board rooms or retreats, global decision-makers don’t get a chance to see sometimes the pain in the faces of laid-off workers.” He knows that the world looks different from Dayton or Chattanooga than it does from Davos.

 

Or does he? Obama wants us to overcome these fears, but he cannot help us do so because even if he understands them, his framework cannot make sense of them. In good Stoic fashion, he wants to elevate the human above all the particulars that make a human a person. We have identities and emotions, but Obama urges us to rise above them and be cosmopolitan and rational.