title: Robert Frost's "The road not taken", Childhood, psychoanalytic symbolism, and creativity.
abstract: Robert Frost, often regarded as a folksy farmer-poet, was also a more profound, even terrifying, creator. His poem "The Road Not Taken" reveals his delight in multiple meanings, his ambivalence, and his penchant for misleading his readers. He denied that the poem proclaimed his striving for the unconventional and asserted that it was meant to tease his friend Edward Thomas for his compulsive indecisiveness. This essay also notes the unconscious meanings of the poem, including Frost's reactions to losing his close friend, his own indecisiveness, his conflict between heterosexual and homosexual object choices, his need for a "secret sharer," and his attachments.
authors.affiliation: Psychoanalytic Institute at N.Y.U. Medical Center, USA.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Glenn
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D003405:Creativity; D006801:Humans; D008093:Literature, Modern; D009769:Object Attachment; D011037:Poetry as Topic; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D013561:Symbolism