Our Workshops

Writer as Reader Workshops

Requiring students to do a close reading of a poem is often problematic. Robert Frost’s poetry, which cries out for such a close reading, epitomizes and highlights some of the problems often encountered. His “The Road Not Taken” is especially interesting to teachers because it has developed a powerful presence in our culture, and, while it is still taught at all levels (from grade school through graduate school), its “meaning” remains disputed. Many see it as a poem about making hard choices and being the better person for it. Most critics, however, read the poem as being from a speaker who mythologizes and falsifies his own past—as we all do, perhaps.  The poem has generated an enormous web presence (websites, videos on YouTube), some of which will be assessed in this workshop, in order to see ways of being sensitive at once to its popular meaning as well as to the words on the page—even if these two readings are irreconcilable. “Road” will be paired with Frost’s nine-line long “Fire and Ice,” which is somewhat more self-consciously self- deconstructing, a more perplexing poem in many ways that hasn’t entered the popular consciousness to the same extent as “Road.”  Yet, are the poems somehow parallel?  Can “Fire and Ice” give some clue to “Road’s” meaning?  What is “meaning,”in fact, and is it finally important and determinate, and if so, why? 

Text: Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose & Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, New York: Library of America, 1995 (ISBN 1-883011-06-x).