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The Road Not Taken
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The Road Not Taken

poem by Frost
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The Road Not Taken, poem by Robert Frost, published in The Atlantic Monthly in August 1915 and used as the opening poem of his collection Mountain Interval (1916). Written in iambic tetrameter, it employs an abaab rhyme scheme in each of its four stanzas. The poem presents a narrator recalling a journey through a woods, when he had to choose which of two diverging roads to travel. The work’s meaning has long been disputed by readers; Frost himself claimed that it was a parody of the Georgian poet Edward Thomas.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Kathleen Kuiper.