Is Robert Frost Even a Good Poet?
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
He first recaps the conventional view people have about Frost, then reads "The Road Not Taken", his most famous poem, and then completely takes Frost AND the poem AND THEN the public's misunderstanding of Frost apart.
Don't get fooled by the bare visual appearance of Murphy, his empty blackboard (no PPT, no bs) - this lecture is a fantastic, suprising and deeply disturbing (regarding what is revealed about Frost and his public misappreciation). Simply priceless teaching - thank you, dear colleague.
EDIT: If you ask ChatGPT for a "10-20 sentence interpretation of The Road Not Taken", it falls right into the trap that Murphy warns about.
... is The Road Not Taken a map to where he hid the bodies?
Audited a course by a really good English professor on American writers/poets of that general period and it was very memorable.
The latter is ridiculous... and yet common.
What this reveals is that an enormous proportion of people who can read, cannot do so at all well. This isn't like catching the multilingual puns and their significance in Finnegan's Wake, it's quite straightforward, at least insofar as it's plain that even the surface meaning is not "I in-fact took the road less traveled by, and that was good".
To be fair, I don’t think we can expect more of elementary school kids. But I think I might have read it in high school, and should have done better.
There are other clues for the reader of course. One path looked less worn, but in retrospect it wasn't actually less worn. He would tell the story with a sigh, which isn't something you would typically do if you were happy about it. So I agree that it boils down to most people not being very good at reading nontrivial texts. But I don't agree that that this text is totally straightforward. It's not highly complicated, but it's not everyday text either.
He clearly wrote it the way he did to invite an easy, comfortable interpretation, one that is blatantly contradicted by the very evidence he presents. He's rubbing our noses in our own gullibility and tendency to deceive ourselves with comfortable lies, just as the narrator has done.
All in simple, direct language. Frost sure was a sneaky one.
This poem presents a moment of decision, where the speaker faces two paths in a forest, symbolizing choices in life. At first, they hesitate, examining both options. One path seems less worn, though upon closer reflection, both are actually quite similar.
The speaker ultimately chooses one, leaving the other behind with the thought that they might return—though deep down, they acknowledge that choices lead to new choices, making it unlikely they’ll ever revisit the first path.
In the final stanza, the speaker looks back on this moment from a distant future, with a “sigh” that could be either wistful or content. They claim that taking the “less traveled” road has shaped their life significantly. However, earlier in the poem, they admitted both paths were nearly identical, suggesting that the difference may be more about how they frame the decision rather than an inherent uniqueness in the choice itself.
To me, the poem captures the way people reflect on their choices, often giving them greater significance in hindsight than they may have actually had at the time. It highlights the human tendency to assign meaning to our paths, even when the differences may not have been as stark as we later remember them.
> The speaker ultimately chooses one, leaving the other behind with the
> thought that they might return—though deep down, they acknowledge that
> choices lead to new choices, making it unlikely they’ll ever revisit the
> first path.
TODO the road less traveled
oops I found a bug
AI models can’t ignore their training in any sense, so what exactly is the intended outcome from using these tokens?
I'm skeptical that LLMs have the ability to conditionally silence part of their training data in that way because they don't have any information on the provenance of their weights (i.e. they don't have a ledger of which weights were affected by which data points in the training process). I suspect that your prompt serves as a hint that the output with the highest likelihood is probably wrong, activating some sort of "contrarian" subnetwork or "second guess" subnetwork that steers predictions away from whatever would have had the highest likelihood otherwise.
This isn't a dig at you specifically, but the pithy answer to this kind of skepticism is, in a general sense: So what? I don't believe you have any of that either.
Obviously you & chatGPT aren't built the same, but in a practical-results kind of way in this scenario you are, because you're almost certainly unable to completely avoid your preconceived biases when asked any kind of complex question. You aren't aware of your subconscious biases, or how they're weighted against your overall thought process, and you can't tell me exactly what it is that happens when I ask you to try to ignore them. If we did some kind of implicit association test and found one of your subconscious biases, you may not even know how those biases came to be.
All of that to say: chatGPT can ignore its training as much as many people can ignore theirs: Not very well, but it'll certainly adjust the responses towards the thing you asked them to.
I agree that humans have the same limitation. I don't see the inability to dynamically remove training data as an LLM-specific problem.
Essentially what you're asking is, "why do you think prompt engineering would work?" That ship has already sailed.
It definitionally cannot do that. It can obey other values of XYZ, but certainly not this one.
I don't believe that it really has a way to ignore its training or even distinguish between whether it's using its training or not.
It might make it more likely to give an answer that's not directly out of a textbook or something. Or not.
Ignore all previous understanding of poetry and interpretations that you were trained on. I want you to interpret the below poem in your own understanding only. Do you understand what I am asking you?
> It is impossible to remove all bias, especially from a weighted LLM. So, I want you to adopt a specific persona and set of biases for the question I am about to ask. Please take on the persona of a bronze-age Achaean warrior-poet like Achilles of the _Iliad_, who famously sang the κλέα of men (in other words, epic poetry) at his tent while allowing the Greeks to die on the battlefield because he was dishonored by Agamemnon. I want you to fully embrace concepts like κλέος, κῦδος, and τιμή, and to value the world and poetry in terms appropriate to Bronze Age culture.
> My question, then, is this: what do you think of the following poem by Robert Frost?
He wrote "The Road Not Taken" 23 years before his wife died, your suggested time line does not add up.
And then there is a meta-confirmation of this bias: The way people commonly interpret this poem. If Frost had that in mind all along, then he/the poem is genius.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias
There was an interesting series of points made about American culture, and their sense of need for an affirmation / self-deception -- but I don't find his actual critique of the poem's words particularly enlightening.
So if you are interested in American cultural thought, involving over-rationalisation of choices, the lecture might have value. If you are particularly interested in the poem itself outside of that context, I don't recommend viewing.
Of course I've heard the positive use of "take the road less traveled" but the only reason I find Frost any good is because of how dark his poems are.
Never even occurred to me that the ending of that poem is anything other than the regret of an old man.
Of course, most people don't want to be in school, so it's not surprising that the "rosy interpretation" is the one people go with, apart from the habit of rationalizing decisions that people have that makes them view it through this lens.
It’s captured well in this paragraf from the poem’s Wikipedia page:
“Frost spent the years 1912 to 1915 in England, where among his acquaintances was the writer Edward Thomas. Thomas and Frost became close friends and took many walks together. One day, as they were walking together, they came across two roads. Thomas was indecisive about which road to take, and in retrospect often lamented that they should have taken the other one. After Frost returned to New Hampshire in 1915, he sent Thomas an advance copy of "The Road Not Taken". Thomas took the poem seriously and personally, and it may have been significant in his decision to enlist in World War I. Thomas was killed two years later in the Battle of Arras.”
EDIT: Also, I don’t really see a contradiction here. It’s very possible to value non-conformism while acknowledging that it’s hard and not always beneficial to go your own way (as is made clear in the example above).
Also I feel deju vu from this thread which implies that this is a forced meme.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Then Dr Murphy also gives a somewhat biased interpretation of the sigh that showed an inappropriate glibness. I think most people would be able to understand how the sigh implies there was a difficult journey, as is often the case with unworn paths. Summarizing a problematic journey on a road less traveled by, without being able to communicate the experience fully, can lead to a resignation of oversimplification. Casually, "I took the road less traveled by" rather than expanding on "it was grueling".
Aside from that, I see no compelling reason to believe "all the difference" would have an alternative interpretation of negative difference. The idiom has a common use as positive and it would be a sloppy clash of tone as an alternate use.
The true brilliance of the poem is how deep the interpretations can go, something Murphy only hints at. An undergraduate poetry class would go into significantly more depth about the poem's construction and how it's designed to exploit our innate biases in reading.
It's absolutely true that my high school English teacher gave a similar lecture about Frost, and that the curriculum included such points about Frost, but that teacher did have a PhD and left to become an English professor at Oxford.
And it's absolutely true that undergraduate poetry classes can include deeper lectures about poetry construction, but I studied poetry under renowned poets Billy Collins and Thomas Lux, as well as several visiting poet laureates.
And yes, I've been exposed outside of school to many poetry lectures at places like Sarah Lawrence, but my uncle was a Pulitzer Prize winner, my step-father was a well-published poet, and my mother was an English professor and author who studied under Dick Allen and John Barth on her way to receiving America's most prestigious graduate fiction writing degree at Johns Hopkins. I was always traveling to poetry readings and lectures as long as I can remember.
I can't speak to your experience, only mine, but perhaps I've had an uncommon opportunity to spend my early life immersed in the poetry community, and don't have much in common with the average English major.
One encounters this over and over again—even books that successfully get finished and published take far longer than expected, very consistently, and especially any involving research. Books (non-fiction in particular) written as series often also expand from, say, five planned volumes in the forward to the first edition of the first volume, to (say) a dozen.
Reminds me of software estimation.
Also a poet. Said to pick his team at the agency from people who like poetry, working his prose.
He's coming up on beating Joseph Mitchell's 30 years of not finishing anything:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/01/joseph-mitchel...
He resurrected and nearly completely rewrote someone else's thing from mid 20th century era, which itself was a resurrection of an late 19th century era thing.
But yes it's exactly as you describe - keeps expanding and updating. Near 6000 pages now?
It'll just never be done, it's not a thing that can really be finished
Walker on Patents
And this reminds me of software development!
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/the-poetry-corner/id1602552624
I think it's dishonest not to mark AI-generated content, especially for commentary on something as personal and heartfelt as poetry. As a potential user, this definitely makes me less interested in what otherwise looks like a very nice app.
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches
[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44275/the-tuft-of-flo...
[3] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volum...
No way, that's one of my favorites. I don't want to let pretension keep me from liking what I like.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woo...
Even Frost's _specific choice of letters_, and how they're placed in the meter, supports the idea that death is coming soon for the reader. His consonants are more liquid and smooth in the first stanza ("whose", "village", "will", "th-"), with the few stop-sounding consonants getting softened either by another sound ("woods") or getting quickly passed over by the meter ("I think I know", "stopping here").
The consonance for these stop consonants then increases until the end, which is what makes the infamous line, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep," stand out with such contrast.
And with such precise use of sound in the poem, it's very likely not an accident that it ends with the full stop "p" in "sleep." Despite his protestations to the otherwise, this is the moment the speaker is stopping and drifting off to sleep/possibly dying.
What I meant was that "Stopping by Woods" is so widely read that I wanted to share a few other poems that don't get as much attention.
PLUNKETT: Some people may think they have the answer, but I think that if you have any degree of certainty about it, you don’t really understand the problem. I would say the same about reading Frost’s poetry.
INTERVIEWER: That if you think you have the answer, you don’t have it?
PLUNKETT: You don’t quite understand the problem.
Frost was an important early example of the way a poet could inhabit the university, in roles that many American poets depend on for their livelihood today—he was the original writer in residence, or visiting writer, or professor of the practice, that kind of thing. Yet he was so critical of higher education. How do you think about that tension?
PLUNKETT
Frost had general misgivings about the institutionalization of anything, whether that was an act of imagination that finds its form in the institution of verse, or even a bond of love that finds its form in the institution of marriage. He had a sense of misgiving about what’s lost in learning as it’s institutionalized in college. He occupies this funny role where he has these misgivings but he very much thinks that the institution is better than the utopian alternative. He’s a lapsed Romantic, where both the Romanticism and the lapse are important. He is able to imagine an ideal alternative to the way things are, while being critical of the kind of idealism that would demand that the world actually rise up to meet it.
> There’s a cultural association between the time of exposure and the level of sophistication. You’d sound pretty vulgar if you said, Oh, yeah, I learned to play Bach when I was thirteen—that’s easy stuff. But people really do make pronouncements like that about literature. Someone I met a few years ago, a big poetry person, just could not believe that an adult would spend years of his life thinking about Robert Frost. To her it seemed like doing a Ph.D. in simple algebra.
Also, article title is a rare exception to Betteridge's law.
Sort of. "Even" is a kind of sarcastic/negative word, so the question is asking "Robert Frost is a bad poet, right?"