The Road Not Taken, David Orr
The Road Not Taken, David Orr
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The Road Not Taken
Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong

Author: David Orr

Narrator: Paul Boehmer

Unabridged: 5 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/25/2020

Synopsis

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . ." One hundred years after its first publication in August 1915, Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" is so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget that it is, in fact, a poem. Yet poetry it is, and Frost's immortal lines remain unbelievably popular. And yet in spite of this devotion, almost everyone gets the poem hopelessly wrong.

David Orr's The Road Not Taken dives directly into the controversy, illuminating the poem's enduring greatness while revealing its mystifying contradictions. Widely admired as the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, Orr is the perfect guide for lay listeners and experts alike. Orr offers a lively look at the poem's cultural influence, its artistic complexity, and its historical journey from the margins of the First World War all the way to its canonical place today as a true masterpiece of American literature.

What Orr artfully reveals is that the poem speaks to both of these impulses, and all the possibilities that lie between them. The poem gives us a portrait of choice without making a decision itself. And in this, "The Road Not Taken" is distinctively American, for the United States is the country of choice in all its ambiguous splendor.

About David Orr

David Orr is the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review. He is the winner of the Nona Balakian Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, and the Yale Review. He holds a BA from Princeton and a JD from Yale Law School, and is Professor of the Practice at Cornell University. A native of South Carolina, David lives at present in Ithaca, New York.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Sue on April 28, 2016

Such an interesting examination of Frost's well-known poem with a view toward Frost's ideas of the individual and self, and a discussion of duality in his poetry. In addition to being an analysis of this poem, Orr provides a careful study of the poet himself and how he wrote, saw himself and his poe......more

Goodreads review by Jimmy on June 29, 2021

Frost had a "typically prickly relationship" with his peers. He described Ezra Pound as trying to become original by "imitating somebody that hasn't been imitated recently." Frost's poem gets googled more than any other poem. It appears the poem was meant as a gentle joke for Edward Thomas. The give......more

Goodreads review by Kris (My Novelesque Life) on October 07, 2018

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: FINDING AMERICA IN THE POEM EVERYONE LOVES AND ALMOST EVERYONE GETS WRONG Written by David Orr 2015; Penguin Press (192 Pages) Genre: poets, poetry, biography, literature review RATING: ★★★1/2 Last night I picked up David Orr's The Road Not Taken - a slim volume of Orr's look at Fros......more

Goodreads review by Bob on January 27, 2016

David Orr's analysis of Robert Frost's most famous poem would have been more interesting to me if I enjoyed deconstructing poetry, which I do not. I picked up this book mainly because of its subtitle; I wanted to see what I didn't understand about a poem that even I knew. To put it succinctly, the p......more

Goodreads review by C. on January 22, 2020

Fascinating Orr's freewheeling exploration of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" delves into the ambiguity of the poem. First by exploring Frost's context then by a very deep read made parallel to contemporary culture, Orr shows that ambiguity between the naive reading and the more cynical one opens......more

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