Author David Orr to talk Robert Frost in Stratford Sept. 13

David Orr (contributed photo)

David Orr, the author of "The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves And Almost Everyone Gets Wrong" will be reading from and signing the book at Two Roads Brewery  on Sept. 13.

 

The event is from 3 to 5 p.m. the brewery is at 1700 Stratford Ave, Stratford. 

 

According to the publisher, the book comes on the centennial of the publication of Robert Frost’s beloved poem. " The book is an engaging, lively exploration of the enormous skill and complexity that went into the creation of the poem, and how and, perhaps more crucially, why we’ve been misinterpreting it for a century," according to a release.

Further, "the popular assumption is that Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” celebrates the victorious self-assertion of an individual choosing to live outside conformity. However, Orr lucidly argues that the poem’s own lines more persuasively suggest that it’s actually a dramatization of the extent to which we mislead ourselves about the control we exercise over our own lives," the release said.
"The poem reveals a person who chooses between identical roads and yet later romanticizes the decision as life altering; and holds two seemingly contradictory meanings in tension, giving us a portrait of choice without making a decision itself. It is a picture of personal choice and the human self that is distinctly American in its exultation of individualism and exceptionalism."

 

Orr, a resident of New York State, is the poetry editor for the New York Times Book Review.  He is a graduate of Yale Law School.