Irrational Choices Exposed in The Road Not Taken Self-reliance in "The Road Not Taken" is seductively embodied as the outcome of a story supposedly representative of all the hood self stories, and whose central episode is that moment of the turning point decision, of the crisis from which a self emerges: a critical, consoling decision for Frost's American readers, based on a rational act in which a self, and therefore an entire life course, are chosen autonomously and irreversibly. Fireside's particular poetic structure in which Frost embodies this myth of selfhood is the analog landscape poem, perhaps most famously performed by William Cullen Bryant in "To a Waterfowl," a poem that Matthew Arnold praised as the best lyric of the nineteenth century and which Frost had memorized since he was a child thanks to his mother's enthusiasm. The analogue landscape poem draws its strength from the culturally ancient and pervasive idea of ​​nature as an allegorical book, in its American poetic setting a book from which to draw explicit lessons for the conduct of life (nature as a self-help text). In his classic Fireside expression, the details of the landscape and all natural events are cleverly arranged for moral synthesis as they march towards the poem's conclusion, like imaginary little lambs to be slaughtered, for their reward in an uplifting message. Frost seems to recapitulate the tradition "in his sketching of the yellow wood and the two roads and in channeling the course of the poem's events to the portentous colon ("Somewhere centuries and ages therefore:") beyond which lies the wisdom we record and we take it home:Two roads diverged in a forest, and I --took the one less traveled by,And this made all the... middle of paper......perfectly understandable to approve - predicts, in other words, what the poem will be sentimentally transformed into, but from a point in the poem that his reading in Atlantic Monthly, so to speak, will never touch on. The power of the last stanza within the Fireside teleology of the analog landscape ensures a Frost his popular audience, while for those who understand his game - some members, let's say, of a different audience, well versed in the small avant-garde magazines and in the betrayals of irony and the impulse of individual talent he seeks, as he urged Pound, to "make it new" against the American literary and social trend - for that reader, this poem tells a different story: that our life-shaping choices are irrational, that we are fundamentally out of control. This is Frost's fabulous "wisdom," which he hides in a moralizing statement that states the consoling opposite of what he knows.