Delusions In Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken

The Road Not Taken: a present made of the past’s little delusions In the poem, “The Road Not Taken,” Frost seemingly presents the reader with a classic problem, but reframed in a literal forest scene. The problem is, how does one know they have chosen the right “path” on their journey through life? That is a question that haunts many, but Frost wryly notes that the question doesn’t really signify much of anything, as it is human nature to glorify the past, wrap it in a protective nostalgia, and the American way to view one’s self as a trailblazer. So, while the poem notes, “I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference” (Frost 19-20), the reader is left with the distinct impression that the narrator really took the path almost blindly, and the true point of significance is that in taking one path, the other is lost and unknowable, and it is only a delusion to assume that
Monteiro compares Frost’s usage to a passage in Longfellow's notebooks: "Round about what is, lies a whole mysterious world of might be… By going out a few minutes sooner or later… we may let slip some great occasion of good, or avoid some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution to the dark enigma but the one word, 'Providence.'" But it seems clear that Frost takes a somewhat different approach to the mysteries of the diverging paths, because instead of focusing on providence, he shifts his focus to the self, and the individual creation of self through the alteration of