{"id":1849,"date":"2013-08-18T15:25:36","date_gmt":"2013-08-18T19:25:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnestes.org\/?p=1849"},"modified":"2013-08-18T15:25:36","modified_gmt":"2013-08-18T19:25:36","slug":"piper-chapman-on-robert-frost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnestes.net\/?p=1849","title":{"rendered":"Piper Chapman on Robert Frost"},"content":{"rendered":"

Orange is the New Black is, well, the new black on Netflix, although Piper Chapman needs a few more seasons, or at least a few more fiction-months behind bars, before she approaches being anywhere near as nuanced as Walter White, who has taken five seasons to travel one fiction-year. But among her many virtues, she is an astute reader of poetry, or at least took good notes in college. Slate has the lowdown on her explication<\/a> of Frost’s “Road Not Taken<\/a>,” where she schools some fellow prisoners on its ironic sentimentality. “Ah shit, we about to get educated and shit,” Taystee says.<\/p>\n

The poem was first misread in Frost\u2019s own lifetime, and Frost sometimes seemed proud of this fact. \u201cI\u2019ll bet not half a dozen people can tell you who was hit and where he was hit in my Road Not Taken,\u201d he told the poet and editor Louis Untermeyer. The poem, he explained, was \u201creally about his friend Edward Thomas, who when they walked together always castigated himself for not having taken another path than the one they took.\u201d (That\u2019s from William Pritchard\u2019s Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered.) In 1925, he told another reader that the poem \u201cwas my rather private jest at the expense of those who might think I would yet live to be sorry for the way I had taken in life.\u201d Thomas, for his part, thought no one would get it: \u201cI doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing,\u201d he told Frost, \u201cwithout showing them and advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n