I am a programmer and I have done almost nothing literary in my whole life. I am not qualified to speak on the semantics of the English language, let alone claim that a famous work is useless.
I don't care. I pay money for this blog, I'll say what I please. Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is a stupid poem.
The poem opens with some riffraff but ends with the following:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
This summarizes the "plot" of the poem. Robert "Yellow Wood" Frost is faced with a choice: take the popular way or take a more unique way. I think it serves as a metaphor: you can follow everyone else, or you can choose your own path. And it makes "all the difference."
But my question is: what difference? Good or bad? Is there a good reason why everyone goes down one path? Is there an ogre on the less-traveled path? A volcano? Did he walk down the less-traveled path and find a pot of gold? Did it get him to the same destination? All we know is that he's alive to tell the tale.
After completing the final stanza, you're left with the obvious conclusion that some decisions are pretty important. There is nothing to gain from this poem and I had to get all pissed off and write this blog post.
I should really get back to programming.