Frost in Dead Poets Society

Frost in "Dead Poets Society" An Analysis of Frost's "The Road Not Taken" in Dead Poets Society Mr. Keating quotes Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" in a scene in Dead Poets Society, in which he instructs the boys to march around outside the school in any way they like. Keating's reading of Frost is a popular one, interpreting the poem as he does as a bugle cry to individuality. While Keating himself embodies this individualistic mentality, Frost's poem may actually be read in a very different manner.

Rather than a call to abandon convention and conformity, "The Road Not Taken" was originally intended as a gentle mockery of those who quite literally take the wrong path. This paper will analyze Frost's "Road" and show Frost originally intended the poem to be read and why readers like Keating read it in a different way.

Described by Frost as a poem in which he was "fooling [his] way along" (Pritchard 128), "Road" was literally meant to be about Frost's "friend Edward Thomas, who when they walked together always castigated himself for not having taken another path than the one they took. When Frost sent 'The Road Not Taken' to Thomas he was disappointed that Thomas failed to understand it as a poem about himself" (Pritchard 127). The problem for Frost's walking friend, of course, was the ambiguity of references within the poem.

In other words, Thomas could not catch Frost's meaning without some guidance from the poet himself. In fact, Thomas "insisted to Frost that 'I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them and advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on'" (Pritchard 128).

Indeed, Thomas' remark was in one sense prophetic -- for the poem became a kind of marching creed of youthful exploration: an ode to stridently taking the road less traveled -- going off the beaten path, so to speak. Frost's poem took on a life of its own -- mainly because of that pregnant pause at the end in the last stanza: "and I -- / I took the one less traveled by" (Frost 18-19).

As Pritchard observes, however, the significance of the poem is largely viewed to be in the following final line: "And that has made all the difference" (Frost 20). Such a sense of exhilaration and satisfaction is read into the line that, for Pritchard, readers tend to forget the rest of the poem.

Pritchard attempts to maneuver the poem's "trickiness" by returning the reader to it's beginning, where, in fact, the two roads are nearly indistinguishable from one another: "the two roads [are] in appearance 'really about the same,'…they 'equally lay / in leaves no step had trodden black,' and…choosing one rather than the other [is] a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly than to say that the road taken [has] "perhaps the better claim'" (Pritchard 127).

Thus, it is clear that what Frost intended was nothing more than a gentle mockery of his friend's inability to stick to the correct path, always taking "the wrong" one. Yet, Frost himself puts the poem on such an ambiguous footing with the last line being uttered in a tone that does not match the rest of the work. The tone may be understood to be one of whimsy and shrugging shoulders -- or it may be understood to be one of solemn pride and satisfaction.

Indeed, for the president of Amherst College, where Frost was invited to stay, "Road" was a rallying cry of liberal education. Yet, the poem was hardly intended to be that at all. Frost himself indicated that the poem was tricky and could be easily misinterpreted. As Pritchard notes, it was meant only to be a poem in which Frost was teasing his friend (125). The poem, however, was read by the Amherst's president and by men like Keating as something more profound.

In other words, "Road" went from being a small, satirical poem to a great, big poem, latching onto a popular kind of youthful ambition and sincerity (the Huck Finn kind -- embracing the wide open; rejecting convention, rules, and stagnant traditions). Even Frost himself seems to have embraced the second reading, taking joy in the poem's effect on individuals who saw it not as man's ineptitude to make his way through life -- but as man's impulsive need to make his own way through life.

The reality behind Frost's poem (upon which it is based) is that the attempt is so often unsuccessful -- which is why the poem was written in a satirical vein. This reality is manifested in the film Dead Poets Society. Neil fails to persuade his father that acting in theater is his dream. Pressured to abandon his dream (his own road), Neil kills himself, extending Frost's satirical meaning in the poem in a tragic way. Likewise, Keating.