Robert Frost’s Readers: The Racial Road Not Taken

Abstract Robert Frost’s Readers: The Racial Road Not Taken seeks to make “good trouble” by reading our country’s most cherished poem to challenge our country’s most potent shibboleth. “The Road Not Taken” is America’s iconic and most misunderstood poem, and I argue its reception speaks volumes about the current backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement that has resulted in efforts to scrub our troubled racial past from our museums, schools, and public places. I argue that for over a century readers have failed Frost’s chief challenge, which has been to encourage us to think about the speaker’s “nonconformism,” and our own. We have failed because since 1915, the year the poem appeared, most readers have seen fit to define their cherished nonconformism by ignoring the racial segregation and discrimination that has long befouled the nation and continues to plague us. This article chronicles the many historical events since the early twentieth century that might have encouraged readers to connect their free thinking with considerations of race in America, but did not. Instead, generations of scholars, readers, and advertisers have been mum about the poem’s relevance to matters racial.