Given the pervasiveness of Frost’s lines, it should come as no surprise that the popularity of “The Road Not Taken” appears to exceed that of every other major twentieth-century American poem, including those often considered more central to the modern (and modernist) era. Scott Peck’s self-help book The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth, which was originally published in 1978 and has sold more than seven million copies in the United States and Canada. At least one of these was a massive international best seller: M. In addition, “The Road Not Taken” appears as a title, subtitle, or chapter heading in more than four hundred books by authors other than Robert Frost, on subjects ranging from political theory to the impending zombie apocalypse. Over the past thirty-five years alone, language from Frost’s poem has appeared in nearly two thousand news stories worldwide, which yields a rate of more than once a week. As one might expect, the influence of “The Road Not Taken” is even greater on journalists and authors. Its lines have been borrowed by musical performers including (among many others) Bruce Hornsby, Melissa Etheridge, George Strait, and Talib Kweli, and it’s provided episode titles for more than a dozen television series, including Taxi, The T w i l i g h t Zone, and B a t t le s t a r Galactica, as well as lending its name to at least one video game, Spry Fox’s Road Not Taken (“a rogue-like puzzle game about surviving life’s surprises”). In addition to the Ford commercial, “The Road Not Taken” has been used in advertisements for Mentos, Nicorette, the multibillion-dollar insurance company AIG, and the job-search Web site, which deployed the poem during Super Bowl XXXIV to great success. Its signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches, that it’s almost possible to forget the poem is actually a poem. It’s “The Road Not Taken,” and it plays a unique role not simply in American literature, but in American culture -and in world culture as well. Lucy Scholes’s column about forgotten booksīut this isn’t just any poem. Robert’s Frost’s Writers at Work interview Looking for something else to read? How about … For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognize a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely. For any mass audience to recognize any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. In the commercial, this fact is never announced the audience is expected to recognize the poem unaided. It is, of course, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice: But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. The advertisement I’ve just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold-for it’s a commercial we’ve been watching-the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he’s chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveler.
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As a car slows to pick him up, we realize the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now he’s accompanied by a lovely woman and a child.
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The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past: the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong, a new book by David Orr.Ī young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path.
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