Tag: and died in WWI two years later

…the critic David Orr deemed Frost’s work “the most misread poem in America,” writing in The Paris Review: “This is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices… The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism. It’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.” In the final stanza, we can’t know whether the speaker is sighing with contentedness or regret as he justifies the choices he’s made and shapes the narrative of his life.