The Road Not Taken

For other uses, see The Road Not Taken (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with The Road Less Traveled.
The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost
First published inThe Atlantic Monthly
Genre(s)Narrative poem
Meteror
Rhyme schemeABAAB
Publication dateAugust 1915
Lines20
Metreirregular iambic tetrameter
Full text
The Road Not Taken at Wikisource
A reading of "The Road Not Taken"
Cover of Mountain Interval, along with the page containing "The Road Not Taken"

"The Road Not Taken" is a narrative poem by Robert Frost, first published in the August 1915 issue of the Atlantic Monthly,[1] and later published as the first poem in the 1916 poetry collection, Mountain Interval. Its central theme is the divergence of paths, both literally and figuratively, although its interpretation is noted for being complex and potentially divergent.

The first 1915 publication differs from the 1916 republication in Mountain Interval: In line 13, "marked" is replaced by "kept" and a dash replaces a comma in line 18.

  1. ^ Robert Frost, "A Group of Poems", the Atlantic Monthly (August 1915). Accessed 2021-03-18.