The Lacanian subject in Robert Frost’s “the road not taken”

Previous research regarding Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” mainly concerns who is the real poet or speaker in the poem. James L. Potter argues that the poet in the poem is Edward Thomas in that Frost is “mocking Thomas’ habit of fretting over choices, present and past” (52). R. F. Fleissner proposes that Frost’s “poetic intent was clearly enough to promote Thomas only, not himself (or also himself)” (22). In contrast, Larry Finger claims that the true poet is Frost despite that Frost did write the poem “with Edward Thomas in mind” (76). Similarly, David Ketterer claims that Frost, as the speaker of the poem, hints at “his life and identity” (78). Furthermore, Henry Hart notes that the poem “drew on an experience Frost had while walking in the woods near Plymouth, New Hampshire, before he had even met Thomas” (176). The debate seems to be focused on the identity of the speaker, namely, that of the speaking “I” which, in a Lacanian sense, is only the ego of Frost. In this article, I seek to read the poem in terms of the Lacanian subject through which I aim to invalidate the debate regarding the identity of the speaker, be it Thomas or Frost, and to delve into Frost’s unconscious. The Lacanian subject essentially differs from the Cartesian subject in that the former is the subject of the unconscious which is “structured like a language” (Lacan, Four Concepts: 203). Lacan further distinguishes that “the subject of the enunciation is definitely not to be confused with the one who takes the opportunity to say of himself I, as subject of the utterance... The I, as it appears in any utterance, is nothing more than what we call a shifter” (Lacan, My Teaching: 85). On the other hand, the subject of the statement, as Bruce Fink argues, “corresponds to the level of the ego, a constructed self taken to be the master of its own thoughts” (Fink 43). In this light, the debate concerning whether Thomas or Frost is the real speaker is of little significance since the “I,” as a shifter, represents only the ego of Frost which takes on various forms. Whether Frost wrote the https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2146478