The Road Less Traveled
HISTORY This Week
The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios
4.5 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2021
⏱️ 27 minutes
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Summary
August 2, 1915. The poem appears in print for the first time this week, from Kentucky to Pennsylvania to Vermont. Every reader is transported to that same leafy path: “two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost becomes an immediate hit and will go on to become one of the most popular and well-known poems in American history. For many, it's about a spirit of individualism -- forging one’s own path. And yet… Robert Frost may have had a completely different meaning in mind. What—or who—inspired Frost to write this iconic poem? And what is it really telling us about how to make a choice?
Thank you to our guests, Professor Jay Parini, author of "Robert Frost: A Life," and Professor David Orr, author of " The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong."
Thank you also to Middlebury College Special Collections, Middlebury, Vermont for their 1953 recording of Robert Frost reading "The Road Not Taken".
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The History Channel, original podcast. |
| 0:03.0 | Hey there, Sally here. |
| 0:05.0 | Before we get started, we have a little something special for you. |
| 0:08.0 | August is going to be Arts and Culture Month here at History this week. |
| 0:12.0 | That means every week in August we are exploring important moments in literature, poetry, painting, and Winnie the Pooh. |
| 0:21.0 | We'll talk about the joke at the center of Robert Frost's Legacy, |
| 0:25.0 | a band of pop music pirates, the Mona Lisa's Heist, and, yes, the birth of Winnie the Pooh. |
| 0:31.0 | So check out Arts and Culture Month on History this week every Monday and August. |
| 0:36.0 | Now onto the show. |
| 0:39.0 | History this week, August 2, 1915. |
| 0:44.0 | I'm Sally Helm. |
| 0:46.0 | The poem appears in print for the first time this week, |
| 0:50.0 | from Louisville, Kentucky to York, Pennsylvania to Rutland, Vermont. |
| 0:55.0 | And every reader in every place is transported to the same leafy path. |
| 1:02.0 | Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, |
| 1:07.0 | and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler. |
| 1:11.0 | Long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where I'd bent in the undergrowth, |
| 1:17.0 | and took the other as just as fair, and having perhaps the better claim, |
| 1:22.0 | because it was grassy and wanted where, though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same. |
| 1:29.0 | And both that morning equally lay, and leaves no step had trotted black. |
| 1:34.0 | Oh, I kept the first for another day, yet knowing how way leads on to way, |
| 1:39.0 | I doubted if I should ever come back. |
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