robert frost goes so hard. he's very dark and people have no clue. that is an obscure reading of the text that you only pick up if you're an avid reader or english major.
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.
... 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.