Robert Frost by Nathan Gelgud, 2015.

You know the poem. The one by Robert Frost, about a guy in the woods. He has to choose a path to take, and he goes down the one that not as many people take, and that's made his life better ever since. You read it in high school, or maybe even junior high. Or it was in a car commercial, maybe.

The poem is Frost's "The Road Not Taken," and as David Orr points out at the beginning of his new book by the same title, it has indeed been used in commercials. According to Google, it's the most searched poem in the English language, beating out T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" by four hundred percent. Oh, and it's not only been used in commercials, but in a Super Bowl commercial. This poem is a cultural heavyweight.

Orr, who writes the "On Poetry" column for The New York Times Book Review, makes the case that despite its notoriety, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is mostly misunderstood. He's on firm ground. Plenty of people don't even know what it's called, often mistaking "The Road Less Traveled" for its title.

"The Road Not Taken" is probably remembered so often as "The Road Less Traveled" because of Scott Peck's bestselling 1978 book by that title. A seminal text of modern self-help literature, Peck's book is essentially a long elaboration of a common misreading of Frost's "The Road Not Taken," amounting to: Life is a difficult, lonely, but ultimately triumphant struggle.

Orr also investigates our society's obsession with choice, as reflected in the self-help industry that Peck helped create. Just search "how to make decisions" on Amazon, Orr suggests, to get a sense of how hung up we are on the idea that the decisions we make and our methods for making them hold keys to a happier, more successful life.

The thing is, the poem is not about making the right choice. In its first two chapters, Orr's book looks into Frost's life and dissects the text. But things get really interesting when he applies his close reading of the poem to question whether there is really such a thing as choice at all. Despite what misinterpretations of "The Road Not Taken" and thousands of self-help books tell us, we are probably doing a lot less deliberate choosing than we think we are, and we might not even be truly capable of independent choice. If we understand this, we get much closer to a richer reading of Frost's famous poem, according to Orr. His interpretation makes for a much deeper appreciation of Frost and his work, if not quite as good a car commercial.