Much of the recent talk about “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost’s famous poem of 1916, centers on whether the speaker’s choice of road really makes “all the difference.” The going view is not just that is doesn’t, but that it couldn’t. The poem’s diverging roads are worn “about the same,” after all; both “equally lay/ In leaves no step has trodden black.” Given this evidence, who’s to say which road was “less traveled by” (or whether either was)? The poem would appear, in fact, to be a sort of subtle joke on the reader. (Frost himself once owned that “The Road Not Taken” was a jibe at his frequent walking companion, the English poet Edward Thomas, for anguishing over real-life choices of road.)

The merits of this view notwithstanding, I don’t think the “all the difference” question has been definitively settled (not even by Frost’s confession; a tricky poet can be a tricky expositor as well). It’s not for nothing that countless readers have taken the poem’s ringing conclusion straight. Frost seems to want to have things both ways in this poem: to assert the importance of an independent path—an importance to which he could personally testify as both an original artist and a self-exile to the New Hampshire sticks—even as his assertion is undermined by the particulars he presents. But then we’re dealing here with a poet who once called himself a “bursting unity of opposites.” (A similar “both ways” dynamic is at work in Frost’s