![]() ![]() Because the world pushes you to deliver your most honest, vulnerable self. Politics, family, relationships, business, school, work, health, you name it, whoever vows the world with the most elemental, poignant insight will take center stage.Īnd that’s why creating, succeeding - sometimes just living - is hard. This phenomenon extends not just beyond poetry to all art, but to all of life. And truth splits them all, right down the middle. Here’s the thing, though: There are two camps of everything. You could also be vague, obscure, or posit something absurd, or unverifiable.īut no matter how small or how hard to find, it’s this kernel of universal truth that makes Frost’s poems great art. Or picking an everyday situation literally everyone can relate to, like the poem - we’ve all had to choose between two options before. Like stating an actual fact, as in the quote. There are many ways to make points that ring like truths that are hard to debate. There’s nothing more divisive than the truth. Like author Michael Lewis once overheard in random conversation in a bar, somewhere in Washington, D.C.: Or, you can react with rage and hate it to the core. ![]() It’s so depressing, so surrendering, that one can’t help but admire it. Our helplessness in the face of the insignificance of our own existence. The laughs and cries, love and grief, people and the weather. “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”Īgain, readers are forced to self-select into two camps: those, who feel some sense of relief and take it as a case for optimism, and those, who are turned off by this bland way of looking at the world.īut there’s something beyond that: It’s impossible to argue with this statement. This clever line is now one of the most popular quotes on Goodreads: Throughout his career, Frost received 40 honorary degrees, 31 Nobel Prize nominations, 4 Pulitzer Prizes and the Congressional Gold Medal. The poem created two completely opposite camps, the freedom fighters and the nihilists, and pitted them against one another.īut there’s even more to the story. Whether it was a planned move on Frost’s end or just one of the many accidental fires started by humanity, the ambiguity was brilliant. Maybe the narrator sighs not because he’s content to take an untrodden path, but because he regrets he can take only one, when, in reality, the choice doesn’t matter and both end up in the same place. The other is that even trying to do so is nonsense. One is that you should always take the less traveled path, make your own choices, and be an independent thinker. Sure enough, much like the two roads in the woods, Frost’s poem offers vastly diverging interpretations of life. There’s a saying that the best art divides the audience. ![]() But in order to survive for over 100 years, the poem couldn’t just be popular. People read, talk about, and teach it in schools all around the world to this day. It’s from The Road Not Taken, written by Robert Frost in 1916, one of the most popular poems of all time. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |