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Tuesday, April 4, 2000

Frost's 'The Road Not Taken', America's most popular poem

By CARL HARTMAN -- The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Americans favor "The Road Not Taken."

Two years ago, poet laureate Robert Pinsky launched a campaign to discover American's favorite poem. He received nearly 18,000 written, videotaped and recorded suggestions, and has found the most popular one -- Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken."

It's the one that ends:

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --

"I took the one less traveled by,

"And that has made all the difference."

Frost read one of his poems at President Kennedy's inaugural in 1961 and died two years later at 88.

Pinsky presented some of the results from his project Monday to the Library of Congress for its archives: 100 video and audio recordings of Americans from all walks of life reading their favorite verses.

More selections and comments from those who chose them appear in a book "Americans' Favorite Poems," edited by Pinsky and Maggie Dietz.

Pinsky, whose term as poet laureate ends in May, said in an interview that W. W. Norton, the publisher, has recently ordered a fourth printing -- 10,000 copies. A Norton publicist declined to give total sales since it was published in November but said it was "doing extraordinarily well," especially for a book of poetry.

Three of those who chose the Frost verses were Fredlyn Rosenfeld, 55, a teacher in Miami Beach, Fla., Cody Hodges, 28, a U.S. Navy officer from Preston, Idaho, and Fran Hall, 73, a homemaker of Madison, Wis.

"The older you become, the more you see 'how way leads on to way,"' said Hall, quoting from the Frost poem to explain her choice.

-- viewer (justp@ssing.by), April 04, 2000

Answers

That's one of my favorite poems too. If you read it carefully, you will notice that neither road was "less traveled" there was only a choice to be made.

Just my $0.02

Cheers!

-- Agent Smith (AgentSmith0110@aol.com), April 04, 2000.

Robert Frost is my favorite poet, but his "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" is my favorite poem of all. I just can't seem to get the beautiful visuals out of my mind...

-- eve (eve_rebekah@yahoo.com), April 04, 2000.