The Most Misread Poem in America (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Most Misread Poem in America (2015)

theparisreview.org

131 pointsdsr1267 comments

Open articleView on HN

A far better article about this poem and the backstory: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/29/robert-frost-e...

I liked both, but I found the Paris Review article more satisfying.

This line in particular:

"A role too artfully assumed ceases to become a role and instead becomes a species of identity..."

Yeah, that line hit me like a punch in the guts.

Edit; and

"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."

This is to me the spirit of America and can be seen in so many ways it projects its power.

When I objected that, no, the two paths equally lay and that the difference was unimportant or unknowable, my high school English teacher forcefully badgered me back into the common misreading -- and then promptly took the minor glory of explaining the more accurate interpretation to the class for himself! He was smart, had a PhD in lit from UMass Amherst, must have known what I was getting at and in all likelihood consciously blocked me. I felt so cheated and for the first time saw a teacher as a competing ego rather than a helper, and I realized that I'd better learn when to trust myself, even in the face of authority.

Ha! That is a dick of a person, but he did teach you a lesson ;) Probably good to learn it as early in life as possible.

I feel more and more like this as I grow older, man I should have trusted my own judgement right then and there.

On the bright side, this set you up perfectly for Emerson's 'Self-Reliance'.

About the poem...and yet the choice DOES make all the difference. The paths go to different destinations. The unknowable part is the true message; the 'just the same' part is only in the appearance, which is what makes life uncertain.

Yes, thanks, I agree! In fact I realized a few hours ago that I'd miswritten by including the "difference," but didn't change it and even wondered if someone would comment on it and, yes!, you have. So thanks. As for the poem, I'm no authority here and I wonder how you see it; to me "that has made all the difference" feels intentionally ambiguous, partly ironic or not, able to reflect the reader's view from different angles and distances. But in any case yes I'm completely with you in that the poem's only stable claim is about the apparent sameness of the paths where the traveller makes their choice, a choice without any distinguishing information. I suppose it does raise the question, what is this "difference," to be mentioned after a sigh, and how valuable can it be when arriving at it versus some other destination came down to a coin flip?

Oddly, my advisor (I have a BA in lit) asked the class to comment on the often ignored line -- but then left it when no one offered the more correct interpretation. (Why I didn't bring it up is another story.)

Funny enough, not long ago a friend who attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop (considered the best MFA in writing in the country, if you're not familiar) said, out of the blue, "about that Frost poem" and I replied, "about the same." We both laughed. Apparently that misreading is widespread, even among the most promising new writers.

Which would you choose now in that moment? The ego teacher or helper teacher?

A further takeaway is to keep a hidden recorder when dealing with these academic authority figures. That way when they stab you in the back like that, you can expose them in front of your class.

Just make sure you have a way out when they give you a failing grade.

This little comic strip made me see the poem in a whole new light. Something I keep coming back to whenever I'm faced with a big choice :)

https://zenpencils.com/comic/60-robert-frost-the-road-not-ta...

This really hit me in a way I haven't been hit by something in a long time. Thanks for sharing.

if like this sort of thing, then, o. henry's 'roads of destiny', is the sort of thing that you might like as well :)

Basically hapiness is mostly function of your physical body, not your live's events. And the end is death all the same.

So basically don't damage your body too much and you'll have all the happiness you could ever have being you. And even if you don't. Don't worry. It'll be over in few short decades anyways.

The most misread poem in England is William Blake's Jerusalem. It was written two centuries ago and put to music a century later. It is the unofficial national anthem and you can hear it everywhere that English football, rugby and cricket teams go. All three of the main political parties sing it at their conferences. It gets an airing every time there is a royal wedding. It was the first thing one billion people got to hear at the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games - a solo performance by a child who happened to be born with only one hand.

This poem has an extraordinary story, Blake was not famous in his time and only thirty years after his death did someone come along to write a biography of him. There were many other happenings that had to happen before Jerusalem became what it is today.

The words appear to be patriotic but on further examination and with the right education the poem can be understood. It is an anti-capitalist, anti-church, anti-establishment masterpiece. Yet vast crowds of people can sing along with it, knowing all the words. It is in a different league of being misread to anything else. Study it.

"The words appear to be patriotic but on further examination and with the right education the poem can be understood"

I think it is both patriotic and also your thesis. That is the British Way.

The popular misreading comes from people who only remember (or perhaps only ever cared about) the last stanza.

The other interpretation comes from carefully reading the whole poem.

Regardless, most humans who come across a non-trivial number of paths will eventually converge on an important truth that is revealed by either of these contrasting interpretations.

Someone who regularly rationalizes a choice between two indistinguishable paths as highly individualistic will eventually come upon a path not taken. At that point they will either fess up to their prior self-deception or carry on deluded.

Alternatively, someone who regularly avoids the beaten path will eventually be faced with indistinguishable options. At that point they will either admit to themselves that not all choices are individualistic, or they will start deceiving themselves.

Consequently, one ought to accept either reading of the poem as a reasonable starting point for a responsible adult to learn a valuable lesson about branching processes.

Finally, all responsible adults who have learned the converged truth should be wary of anyone who in casual conversation dares utter a sentence starting, "Actually, you are misreading that poem..."

I humbly offer the following canned response: "Wow, sounds like somebody is revved up like a douche."[1]

[1] Most misheard lyric from "Blinded by the Light" by Bruce Springsteen

>[1] Most misheard lyric from "Blinded by the Light" by Bruce Springsteen

Actually...it's the Manfred Mann [0] cover of the song that contains the lyrics in question; Springsteen's original version [1] uses slightly different words for that line and so it's perfectly intelligible.

[0]https://youtu.be/Rpq35wyDi7I?t=10

[1]https://youtu.be/7Iaca30QbOo?t=80

So "cut loose like a douche" vs "revved up like a douche."

I think it's less that it's a misread poem than it's an unread poem for most people, who only know a few key lines taken out of context.

I do think misread is fair. As far as I remember, the traditional teaching and interpretation of the poem was the heroic individuality one. When a college English professor taught a number of decades ago that, in his view, that was the wrong interpretation that was novel to me and for many people.

The meaning is perhaps still ambiguous in that a number of people I've discussed this with stick to the traditional interpretation. But I'm at least convinced that "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."

I think it's still fair to say it's mostly unread if all they remember (and think about) are a few selective parts that twist the original meaning.

It's kind of like Every Breath You Take by The Police. People hear the full song plenty of times but they only think about the ones that match the happy love song pattern. Everything else is in one ear, out the other.

In some ways, the "misinterpretation" bringing about an oppositional meaning is poetic in and of itself.

EDIT: also, I'm not really trying to argue whether it's "unread" or "misread" (I could attribute selective memory to either one). It's that I think there's more to it than "misread" often warrants. Maybe everything I've said is what you meant by misread.

Yeah first thing that came to mind was that exactly.

The meaning of poetry is what the reader wants it to be just as much as what the author intended it to be.

A single scene in the Netflix show "Daredevil" taught me more about the arts than anything else in my 34 years. An art dealer tells a man "I tell them it's not about the artist's name or the skill required, not even about the art itself. All that matters is: 'How does it make you feel?'"

But in this case, this isn't just about "what the reader wants" versus "what the author intended." It's about "what the words actually say." The poem tells us that in the moment, the narrator sees that neither road is more or less traveled than the other, and only in the future will the narrator say he took the road less traveled by. We don't need to know anything about Frost or his intentions to see that this is what the poem says.

So you might say that the meaning is not as important as how it makes you feel. But unless you're going to just come out and say that words have no meaning (and what would you say such a thing with?), the meaning of the poetry is somewhat independent of what the reader wants it to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)

But sometimes when the author say "the curtain is blue" the curtain is just blue.

If a person reach some original enlightenment trough a poem words doesn't necessarily mean the word have an hidden meaning, it's likely that the poem meaning plus the reader baggage construed composed or concurred into an original thought that's derivative but independent from the work itself and attributing that specific enlightenment to the work alone seems inappropriate first because the meaning isn't there and second because it diminish the reader turning it's originality into passive dissonance

An apple is an apple, if it moves to eat an apple because it reminds of grandma's apple pies then it's not that the apple itself has an universal meanings of grandma's. It has to you, but at face value it's still an apple for as much the eater wished it was grandma's pie, it still remains an independent thought formed from the apple but not what an apple is, the apple is still an apple.

I am still free to make fun of people for their senseless interpretations, however nice it makes them feel.

I wouldn't say the author's intended message or skill doesn't matter at all [0]. While how it makes you feel is what ultimately matters most, the author's thoughts/intentions/context can and should significantly affect the meaning you take from the artwork [1].

To completely ignore original intent would be like using "exception proves the rule" at face value (one of my personal pet peeves).

[0]: Directly interpreted from "all that matters".

[1]: I'd also agree that people get caught up in the who/how and lose sight of just enjoying things, which is clearly what the quote was trying to convey.

I wrote about this specific topic in a poetry class I took in college.

It's surprising how this sentiment was frequently demonstrated by Frost himself. He'd frequently claim how important some life changing moment was in his life and then later walk that back and It's been a long time back now so I can't completely remember all the examples I found but I think an uncle or such paid for part of his education. Frost would go back and forth about how this relative left him high and dry and making it on his own was very important. Then on other occasions he'd opine about how important this relative was and how it made a difference in his life.

Write what you know.

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10204255

Like all great poems, there are multiple, opposite meanings built into it, held in tension by deliberately ambiguous meanings of words. Here is one set of opposites: “it made all the difference” (in the last line); This could be a good difference or a bad difference or — since, importantly, we don’t even know if the speaker will survive in the future to utter that last wistful line — a catastrophic difference.

Here’s another set of opposites: making a difference vs. not even making a difference — I’d argue that these are both possible (it’s not that one is a “popular misreading” as claimed by the article). The speaker is acknowledging that he has no really good reason, after all, for choosing one road over the other at the moment of decision; he is recognizing the bit of self-delusion he had to exercise in order to rouse himself to a decision...but that certainly doesn’t mean that it won’t indeed turn out to have “made all the difference” in the end. He and we just don’t know.

But, taking a step back, I’d argue that it isn’t even clear that the chosen road really did turn out to be “equally well traveled” (as the commentary of the article hinges on). This itself could be another bit of mild self-delusion. The speaker suffers from grass-is-greener-itis, always pining for the road not taken (it’s even in the name of the poem!). He did not choose the road he was last looking down (until it “bent into the underbrush”) because it looked too well traveled to him and he wants to be independent... but once he chooses the other road and sets out, this “other road” also begins looking too well-traveled for his taste. Chronic dissatisfaction coloring his perception? After all, his perception would have been more objective when pondering both roads equally, before investing himself in the decision. Perhaps the road taken really is less well-traveled. Again, we just don’t know the underlying reality; the poem deliberately prevents us from knowing.

Relatedly, possibly the most misread quote in America:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-ben-franklin-really-said

I wonder if this is a specific instance of a general principle, namely that sarcasm is hard to identify in written form.

> For any mass audience to recognize any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual.

This isn't anywhere close to being true. Mass audiences routinely recognize poems; we call the phenomenon "popular music".

Except that if you investigate it turns out that most people don't actually listen to the song texts to any meaningful degree.

Yet they can sing the whole thing verbatim? How does that work?

Lexing vs parsing. ;)

And "Born in the USA" would fit perfectly in this discussion.

The problem boils down to the poem being taught in high school when the average American teenager has yet to have made any independent choices, nor have they ever really had to live with the consequences of some decision made when they were a younger, different person.

Most middle class kids live a very scripted lives, but are constantly hammered with the idea that soon they will be called upon to make their own decisions - usually characterized by a binary to continue the scripted path - college, corporate job, marriage in late twenties or thrities - or a second, riskier outlet into 'there be dragons' land. In this context, it's not surprising that the poem has become a concise stand-in and beautiful articulation of contemporary middle class social consensus.

If I'm remembering this correctly, I came across this poem in the wake of a solo startup disaster. And I instantly got the second meaning without any need for literary deconstruction or critical nudging. I vividly remembered the excitement of the choice at the start. I now knew about how we tend to ponder what might have been. And could list many "founder success stories" told ages and ages hence of how I - I chose Angular2, and that has made all the difference.

And that is genius of this poem, that it can (only?) be read differently by those with a certain amount of lived experience. It hides its meaning in plain sight and straight forward vocabulary (unlike Wasteland) and let's the reader insert himself and his entire life into this tiny vignette.

I find the lines:

----

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

----

to be perfectly clear ... and suited to the 'common misreading'...

A poem is more or less ink spots on a piece of paper; it means what the reader finds in its deliberate ambiguity ... not what some 'expert interpreter' insists it means.

They suit the common misreading if the very next four lines don't exist. Which is why it's a misreading--it's like ignoring every word after "however," in a sentence.

Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same, / And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.

To be fair, while ambiguity can be intended by the author, a poem usually has a finite number of meanings intentionally written into it.

If those experts find meaning in a poem the author did not write into it, they failed at their job.

If however a poem is found to mean something the author did not intend to say, the author failed.

An English teacher in high school, emphasising that poetry was subject to interpretation, once recounted to us that John Donne was once attacked in a newspaper over his exposition of the meaning of a poem that he himself had written!

Language is not static in time and space.

It is your job as the reader/expert to interpret a poem based on the language as it was spoken and understood in the time period the poem was written.

I wrote a little answer about this poem on the Literature Stack Exchange a year and a bit ago: https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/493/why-does-... (See also the answer there by ”Rand al'Thor” for useful historical background—referencing the Guardian article mentioned in another comment here—and the succinct answer by Mark Baker.)

There is an apparent contradiction in the poem (which is what the question there was about), which disappears on a closer reading.

I came in to this pretty skeptical. I think being skeptical of things "experts know" about art is absolutely reasonable (e.g. I still see no justification for idolizing the Mona Lisa).

However, after reading the wikipedia article [1] it makes a pretty compelling case that this poem is poking fun at the type of person who projects too much meaning into "mistakes" from the past.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken

Brings to mind the Sex Pistols' cover of Sinatra's My Way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKpsqgt2-9k

"Fire and Ice" is also quite misread and well recognized. Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

In what sense is "Fire and Ice" misread?

Does it not say "desire (fire) is the most powerful and potentially destructive passion, but hate (ice) is not far behind?". Disclaimer: never read any analysis about the poem, that's just my take.

it is also somewhat ironically meant I think:

From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire

by saying he holds with those who favor fire, he says in fact that he favors desire, which he has experienced in the past. He would like the world to end in desire.

So he subtly changes the question from how do you think the world will end to how do you want it to end. But then being Frost, and somewhat ambiguous, he changes it back, deciding that hate will also suffice (to destroy the world).

I mean obviously it is just very playful.

See also: "Good fences make good neighbours", which was (possibly/probably) intended to be sarcastic.

It says that everyone understands what "White Christmas" is really about. They don't.

Here's a thought... Americans can't live with ambiguity.

And who misread the title as "The Most Misread Porn in America"?

I don't know this poem, the author and any of the other supposedly "best-known modern poems and their authors".

Yet I can sing a few of the Vinicius de Moraes poems by heart.

Yeah, though I recognize the sayings through 'pop culture' obviously. As it goes "all generalizations are bad!". But I'm under the impressions that they meant this is a poem known to all _American_ readers which could be possible if it is required high school material.

Personally I'd have expected 'The Raven' by Poe to be more well known, but that might just be my bubble. :)

Pedantic, narrow-minded pinheads will always find a way to prove their superiority with ridiculous crap like this. "You're doing it wrong" is classic click-bait for a reason [1]. "You're using 'ironic' incorrectly! Oxford commas is the only correct punctuation! Everyone should use Tau instead of Pi!" Yada, yada, yada.

The sentiment of this poem is expressed extremely clearly, which is why it's so popular. We're not all idiots, illiterate or suckers. The last stanza clarifies and reinforces the rest of the poem. Any alternative interpretations of this poem are from 'smarter-than-thou' morons who want to show off how they are more educated and intelligent than you.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/every...

I appreciate your cynical anti-cynicism, but most people probably do misinterpret the poem. And they don't have to be idiots either.

Also, the last stanza, and specifically the last line states the opposite of the meaning. It does not "clarify" it. "And that has made all the difference." In actuality, there was no difference. So it's not clear, especially not if someone isn't paying attention to what they read. A lot of people don't pay attention to this sort of stuff, and again, it doesn't mean they're idiots or they did something wrong. I didn't get it the first couple of times I came across this poem.

But go on, anyone who tries to explain something commonly misunderstood is some kind of a jerk or whatever.

It's not exactly the opposite of the meaning... it's more that the last three lines are framed as how he will one day describe the choice he just made, even though he has already described that choice in a way that makes clear his future description is going to be largely BS.

Literally 20% of the lines of the poem are spent saying there is NO discernable difference in how much the two roads have been traveled. Another 10% are saying the roads both look great and he'd like to travel on each of them. Then the conclusion -- the only bit most people remember -- is explicitly said to be what he will say "ages and ages hence". There is zero indication that's what he actually thinks at the time the poem is written.

The argument in this article isn't some sophisticated take on the poem. It's just a straight literal reading of what the poem says. The only bit that's in any way fancy is recognizing that when the poet says he's going to say something (instead of just directly saying that something) you might have to think about why the poet is putting things in that very roundabout way.

In this case, we have Frosts words to lean on for a specific intent, and Frosts words to tell us that he himself personally experienced people misunderstanding it.

The last paragraph takes a step back to talk about how one interpretation, no matter the author's original intent, does not necessarily supersede the other. Basically, they are careful to point out that your interpretation of the poem is just as valid as any other.

The sentiment of this article is expressed extremely clearly... we're not all idiots, illiterate, or suckers...

> Any alternative interpretations of this poem are from 'smarter-than-thou' morons who want to show off how they are more educated and intelligent than you.

I'm not sure how you could get more narrow-minded and "smarter-than-thou" than this very statement.

So I've been reading this wrong the entire time?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com