Who wrote the poem "The Road Not Taken"?

Robert Frost wrote the poem “The Road Not Taken.” First published in 1915, it presents a traveler pausing in a yellow wood and facing two diverging paths, an image that has become one of the most recognizable symbols of choice in American poetry.

The poem is frequently treated as a straightforward celebration of independent decision-making. Its language is more complicated. The speaker admits that the two roads were worn “really about the same,” yet imagines later claiming that he chose the less traveled one. That tension gives the poem its irony and makes the ending open to competing interpretations.

Frost wrote the poem partly in response to his friend Edward Thomas, with whom he walked in England. The poem contains 20 lines and uses an ABAAB rhyme pattern. It first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and was later included as the opening poem of the 1916 collection “Mountain Interval.”