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Robert Frost and the Work of Retelling

It has been almost forty years since Richard Poirier began Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing by adverting to the prevailing assumption that Frost “is more easily read than are his contemporaries.” Despite subsequent interventions by readers as “strenuous”—it is Poirier’s word—as William Pritchard, Katherine Kearns, and Mark Richardson, the assumption persists. That a modern poet ought to be difficult, and that Frost’s poems are not, remains a predisposition that many readers of Frost, if I may judge at least from the behavior of my students, continue to bring to the page. Frost’s strongest poems often take as their subject the expectation that they will go under-read, with “The Road Not Taken” being the most famous case in point. When teaching the poem I continue to be astonished at its power to disarm an attentive reading and to encourage instead a careless and self-congratulatory one. “‘The Road Not Taken,’” I say to the class. “What do you think of when you hear that title?” Invariably the students answer with, “Oh, yeah, the road less traveled by.” This is the takeaway; this is the line written in order to be remembered. And Frost knows we will remember it. He knows we will remember it and carry it with us, like a talisman or a magic ring, just as we are likely to do something similar with another takeaway line, “‘Good fences make good neighbors.’” What we are less likely to remember, or to find too burdensome to carry with us, is another line from “Mending Wall,” “He will not go behind his father’s saying.” Going behind what is being said sounds like a formula for a kind of literary criticism students assume to be on the teacher’s mind when