The use of irony in The Road Not Taken"The Road Not Taken", perhaps the most famous example of Frost's statements on irony aware and "the best example in all American poetry of a wolf in sheep's clothing." Thompson documents the ironic impulse that produced the poem as Frost's "gently provocative" response to his good friend, Edward Thomas, who in their walks together led Frost along one path and then regretted not taking a better direction. According to Thompson, Frost takes on his friend's mask, taking his voice and posture, including the non-Frostian line, "I'll say it with a sigh", to mock Thomas's vacillations; Frost ever after, according to Thompson, sought to bring the audience to the ironic point, warning one group: "You must be careful with that one; it is a complicated poem - very complicated" (Letters xiv-xv). Thompson's critical assessment is simply that Frost, in that particular poem, had "carried himself and his ironies too subtly", so that the poem is, in effect, a failure (Letters xv). Yet is it simply that: a too-exact parody of a mediocre poetic voice, becoming, ironically, among the sentimental masses, one of Frost's most popularly beloved "wise" poems? This is the simplest way to critically reckon with the popularity of "The Road Not Taken" but it is not, perhaps, the only or best way: in this critical case, the road less traveled may in fact be more productive . By all accounts Frost was genuinely fond of Thomas. He wrote his only elegy to Thomas and gives him, in that poem, the highest praise of all from those who hoped to be a "good Greek" himself: he elegy Thomas as "First soldier, and then poet, and then both, / Who died poet-soldier of your race." He remembers Thomas to Amy Lowell, saying that "the closest friendship I ever had with anyone in England or anywhere else in the world, I believe, was with Edward Thomas" (Letters 220). Frost's protean ability to assume dramatic masks never elsewhere included a friend like Thomas, whom he loved and admired, significantly, more than "anyone in England or anywhere else in the world" (Letters 220). It could be argued that, by becoming Thomas in "The Road Not Taken", Frost momentarily loses his defensive concern with masking lyrical involvement to the extent that ironic weapons fail him..