![]() ![]() For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognize a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely. For any mass audience to recognize any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. In the commercial, this fact is never announced the audience is expected to recognize the poem unaided. It is, of course, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice: But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. ![]() The advertisement I’ve just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold-for it’s a commercial we’ve been watching-the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he’s chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveler. As a car slows to pick him up, we realize the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now he’s accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past: the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong, a new book by David Orr.Ī young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". “What matters most, the poem suggests, is the dilemma of the crossroads,” a troubling, unsettling intersection a space, Orr suggests, “for performance and metaphor.”Īn illuminating voyage into the heart of Frost’s poem and the American spirit.Īn extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. ![]() Instead, many readers took the poem as underscoring Americans’ “belief in human perfectibility, a concept that assumes the humans in question can make choices that will lead to improvement.” As the poem seems to imply, taking one road rather than another can make “all the difference.” Orr, though, concludes that the poem is a “critique” of the choosing self. “The Road” was inspired by Frost’s dear friend Edward Thomas, who tried Frost’s patience with his “romantic sensibility,” indecisiveness, and “self-dramatizing regret.” Frost meant the poem as a joke, but Thomas-and future generations of readers-failed to understand the humor. “He’s like a disputed frontier, constantly contested, and this book is yet another stone thrown in that conflict.” Orr sees Frost as neither monster nor angel, nor the modest, “witty, rural sage” that became his public image. “Frost is always being rescued, always being reclaimed,” Orr notes. Anyone writing about Frost confronts an early biographer’s portrayal of him as a monster: unfeeling, arrogant, and cruel. Orr presents a fresh, perceptive reading of the verse places it in the context of Frost’s life, other works, and public persona and considers the meaning of choice in American culture. The poem, he argues, is not “a salute to can-do individualism” or an exhortation to choose an uncommon path in life. New York Times Book Review poetry columnist Orr ( Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry, 2011) brings his finely honed skills as a literary critic to a meticulous investigation of Robert Frost’s beloved poem, “The Road Not Taken,” which Orr believes has been consistently misread. ![]()
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