Explication

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"Choosing in Frost"

Critic: David M. Wyatt

Source: Frost: Centennial Essays II, edited by Jac Tharpe, pp. 129-40. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1976.

[(essay date 1976) In the following essay, Wyatt discusses the element of surprise in "The Road Not Taken."]

Surprise: Robert Frost writes continually of it. As a disposition toward life it becomes a project for poetry, a way of moving through both. Even metaphor emerges as something come upon unawares. With a tenor firmly in mind, Frost can happen at any time upon a hidden vehicle. The pleasure is in falling for something one didn't expect to find, in a place one didn't know one was: "the pleasure of ulteriority."1 So in the act of composition the poet remains absent from himself, waiting to surprise himself as he emerges onto the landing from which the climb into and out of the poem might be viewed. His "intention" is pleasantly ulterior, of "a particular mood that won't be satisfied with anything less than its own fulfillment. But it is not yet a thought concerned with what becomes it. One thing to know it by: it shrinks shyly from anticipatory expression. ... A poem is the emotion of having a thought while the reader waits a little anxiously for the success of dawn." Unlike his forerunner Thoreau, Frost does not wish to prepare his own way, "To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself!" This is Frost's greatest fear: that he might anticipate himself and the unforeseen destiny of his poem.

Frost's