Which American poet wrote the line 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood'?

Robert Frost wrote the line “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” in his poem “The Road Not Taken.”

The poem was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in August 1915 and later appeared as the opening poem in Frost's 1916 collection Mountain Interval. It contains four five-line stanzas and uses an ABAAB rhyme scheme, giving its reflective meditation a carefully controlled musical structure.

The poem is often treated as a straightforward celebration of choosing an unconventional path. Its language is more complicated than that popular reading suggests: the speaker admits that the two roads were worn “really about the same.” Frost wrote the poem partly as a joke for his friend Edward Thomas, who often regretted whichever route the pair had not taken during their walks.

Another common mix-up is attributing the line to Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson because all three are major American poets. Frost's poem is specifically about choice, memory, and the stories people later tell about their decisions—not simply about always choosing the less-traveled option.