There is a great pleasure to reading children’s books as an adult that is separate from the pleasure of remembering them. The Magician’s Nephew was probably my favourite book as a child. Reading it now it a dual pleasure of rediscovery and current immersion.

But there is, perhaps, a greater pleasure in reading children’s books as an adult for the first time. When I first read Charlotte’s Web, though, I was in my twenties. This was a whole new world. I read it in one sitting and was distraught by the ending. I read, that is, for the first time in many years, like a child.

What does that mean? Beyond the sense of reading so deeply that the world around you goes quiet and you feel, once you put the book down, like you just came to the surface after being submerged (a feeling we are all more likely to associate with going down internet rabbit holes—a phrase, very tellingly, that comes from Alice in Wonderland), reading like a child means reading with the simple acceptance of the imagination, which is akin to having a simple faith.

By simple I mean, “undesigning; sincere”. This is not naive or witless simplicity, but the simplicity of one who is able to take the book on its own terms rather than constantly assess it, search within it to decode its meaning, or to be forever pattern matching the book against your existing beliefs and ideas to decide “what it means” or “what sort of message” it has for you or, worst of all, to decide if you approve of the book. Books must be allowed to teach us how to read them, but as adults we are forever allowing our own feelings to colour our reactions to a book. Children are much better at simply entering the world of the book itself.

So many people want to hear optimistic, hopeful messages (and spend too much time watching movies and shows that have redemptive story arcs), and will find them in the books they read—hence the culture that treats Jane Austen primarily as a romance writer without giving equal weight to the satirical and the philosophical elements in her work. We are largely secular and so much less able to see the religious aspects of many classic novels: yes Jane Eyre is feminist, but it is feminist in a very low-Church manner that is now much less visible to us. We see what know; but if we read like children we will see what is there.

Children, as Diana Wynne Jones was always saying, pay much more attention than adults. They enter into the world of the book and they accept what it tells them. We find St. John irritating and we disapprove of him, so we glide more easily over his section. Children are so absorbed in the book they come away with much clearer ideas of the world they have been reading about. As adults reading children’s books we can start to rediscover that ability to enter the dream of the work of art.

Some of you will recall that this is similar to the distinction A.D. Nuttall makes between opaque and transparent criticism. The opaque critics stay outside the art: they are formalist and make the formalities of the text opaque, so we can see how the trick is done, as it were. The transparent critics leave the formal techniques transparent, so that they can be inside the art.

This is an example of opaque criticism: “In the opening of King Lear folk-tale elements proper to narrative are infiltrated by a finer-grained dramatic mode.” This is an example of transparent: “Cordelia cannot bear to have her love for her father made the subject of a partly mercenary game.” As Nuttall says, both are valuable, but the opaque critics tend to distrust transparency. And “If the critic never enters the dream he remains ignorant about too much of the work.”

Children are naturally transparent readers. Adults are naturally opaque (albeit many of their critical faculties are too personal, too assumptive, and thus lead to mistakes). Reading children’s books is a splendid way to retrain the transparent function of your reading mind.

And the more you read books you already know, the more you will be able to read as both an opaque and transparent reader. We all know that Narnia is both an immersive fantasy and a Christian allegory. Similarly that Lord of the Rings is both a seminal work of high fantasy and a moral tale about the battle of good and evil. His Dark Materials is another good example.

Transparent reading is the basis of all good opaque reading: they are not separate and distinct modes of appreciation; they are linked. Until you know a text very deeply you cannot appreciate it in its fullness. To really see Jane Austen’s genius we must re-read her works. To really understand what Shakespeare accomplished we must be able to think ourselves around inside the plays. We must build the word of a novel in our minds to compare, juxtapose, analyse, and assess it properly. Otherwise we end up with a very dry and technical criticism that wins the book no readers and the critic no joy.

This sort of transparent reading is what makes writers like Hilary Mantel and Alan Hollinghurst so popular. There is much good opaque criticism to be made out of their works, but they are only worth that sort of critical attention because they are so rewarding for the transparent reader. When people complain that Dickens wrote too many words I have a similar reaction: we do not want books to be taut and tight just for ease of analysis; we want them to be little realms that we can occupy. Some writers can achieve that in very small space, some in very large ones, and some gifted writers (Dickens very much included) can do it in both.

Dickens is a good example of this phenomena because he is like a children’s author inverted. It is often said of great children’s literature like Lewis, Pullman, Milne, Rundell and so on that it can be enjoyed by adults as well as children; Dickens is the inverse: he can be enjoyed by children as well as adults. Not young children, perhaps, but he is far more exciting to the junior mind than many other great novelists. He allows the transparent faculty full reign—indeed, he demands it. His novels shimmer with the tinge of fantasy, as if by opening them you are walking through a wardrobe into a place with its own rules.

A place where the simple faith of imagination will be richly rewarded.

Some of the children’s books I have been reading

Unraveller
I just began this book and while it seems too long it is a very well-executed concept. I enjoy writers who are able to make magic real rather than those who reiterate the tropics of previous fantasies and I will be reading more books by Frances Hardinge.

Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
This series is so deeply embedded in my imagination I have no idea how far down it goes. I wrote a story for my children a couple of years ago and was startled to see just how similar it was to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader on this reading. My copies have creased spines and folded corners. I remember sitting up at night reading them at the age my daughter is now (seven/eight). Alas, though they enjoyed The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, my own children seem uninterested in Narnia. I will never forgot its forests and wastes and castles and animals; I especially love the dragon and magician in Voyage. And I will never ever ever watch the films.

The Thirteen Clocks
This was new to me, by James Thurber, a satirical, poetic, gothic story, written in lovely prose. It is as strange as the best books of its type always are. I am now very interested to read his other fantasy stories. A clear influence on Neil Gaiman (who wrote the introduction in my edition)—anyone who has read Stardust will see the roots in this as well as in books like The Last Unicorn and The King of Elfland’s Daughter.

Cart and Cwidder
My love affair with the work of Diana Wynne Jones continues. I am finding Dalemark less immersive than the other series I have read and might soon give in to the immense and itching compulsion to re-read The Lives of Christopher Chant, which I love very much, not least because it interacts with The Magician’s Nephew. However, this book is richly imagined and Jones is a lesson is how to unfold a world without having to explain it: there are good things on every page.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
One reason I have been enjoying the Joan Aiken series is that I retain very mild, but very persistent, Jacobite feelings. Not that I wish England to have been governed as a Catholic country (cradle Catholic though I was). The Reformation served us well enough, though we were needlessly cruel to Catholics for many long years. It has to be admitted that in a nation obsessed with the idea of monarchy, succession, and the One True King, the Hanoverians have been remarkably successful. They still are. There shall be no nonsense here about calling the current Royals the Windsors, or their old name the Saxe-Coburg Gothas—we don’t need to retain the romantic myth of patrilineal descent. Victoria was as Hanoverian as anyone, as was her Germanically -plump and mischievous son; the modern Royals have plenty of the spirit of Victoria’s “wicked uncles”, with their drinking, philandering, and private scandals. The twin strain of George III’s dutiful, devout nature and his children’s runaway, reprobate temperament still defines the Royals more than anything else. King Charles has the busy reforming nature of Albert, but few others have shown that side of their inheritance. No, we pseudo-Jacobites must accept that the monarchy still works remarkably well because it is Hanoverian. It is hard to imagine the lush and luxurious Stuarts adapting so well to democracy, alas.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

In the first line, we find one of the core principles of reading poetry—ambiguity. An air can be either the air Housman breathes or a song, music he has heard from a distance. The plain statement, that each breath we take is one breath closer to death, is made gentler by this double meaning. If the air is a song, then kills has a different meaning, as defined by the OED as “destroying vitality, neutralizing”; in this sense, Housman is killed the way an engine or a light get killed. The song has stalled him.

The second line explains his startlement: even when Housman was writing, in the 1890s, “yon” was falling out of use. It has a nostalgic tone. Housman, we begin to realise, is looking towards the past. Hence “blue remembered hills”, blue because light scatters and sends the blue spectrum furthest away, hence its use in landscape painting for the most distant hills. Blue denotes physical distance, and blue remembered becomes metaphorical of lost time in our minds.

This all becomes more overt in the second stanza, when he uses the allegorical, fairy-tale like “land of lost content”. This is not a real place: there is no village sign that says The Land of Lost Content: it represents lost youth. The paradox of seeing something “shining plain” expresses the state of nostalgia, where we see things in simple terms, even though that’s not how they really were. Is it so plain, this distant place whose spires he cannot make out? Things that shine in the distance have an elusive quality, too bright to be seen clearly.

The ending recalls Heraclitus—you can never step into the same river twice, or walk the same road again. The air is always blowing, time always moving on. We are time’s subjects, as Shakespeare wrote, and time bids be gone.

The duality of Housman’s poem—past and present, age and youth, reality and imagination—shows us another core principle of poetry: division or antithesis. Two modes or ideas (or more) often jostle together inside great writing. They are resolved with surprise, contradiction, synthesis, or ambiguity. In this way, poets don’t moralise or dictate, but evoke a mood or emotional state, to make you feel a particular mood. This is the aim of poetry: to posses you, temporarily, and to make you feel particular sensations.

In Sleep and Poetry, John Keats wrote that the great end of poetry is that

… it should be a friend
To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts…

Paraphrasing and responding to Keats, Harold Bloom wrote about this passage: “The nature of poetry is to be disinterested, but its function is consolatory and enlightening.” For Keats, poetry is not supposed to dogmatise, it has no ideology. Instead, “she governs with the mildest sway.” A poem grows out of consciousness, says Bloom, as naturally as leaves come to a tree.

Sometimes the sway is not so mild. Samuel Johnson wrote about Macbeth, “He that peruses Shakespeare looks around, and starts to find himself alone.” (Starts means jumps because startled.) Note that nothing had happened; quite the opposite. What startles Johnson while reading Shakespeare is not that someone else has interrupted him, but that he suddenly woke up from the dream of reading, not quite aware that everyone around him had faded away.

In Henry IV part II, Falstaff says of himself , “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.” Poetry is similar: it expresses certain thoughts and feelings, but in a way that holds us in a mild sway, and causes those feelings to be really felt in our minds, so that when we realise we have been lost in imagination, we startle to see we are back in reality. As George Eliot wrote about the poet Heinrich Heine, poets utter our feelings for us.

We’ve seen three core principles of poetry so far: division, allegory, ambiguity. And we’ve seen that poetry aims not to argue with us, but to hold us in a mild sway. Let us look at a more difficult poem by Emily Dickinson, not just to see division and ambiguity at work, and to see the mild sway of poetry, but to think about how to find our way into a difficult piece of writing.

Through what transports of Patience
I reached the stolid Bliss
To breathe my Blank without thee
Attest me this and this —

By that bleak exultation
I won as near as this
Thy privilege of dying
Abbreviate me this —

Dickinson’s poem is full of irony—she uses antithesis or division not to put opposites on display, like Housman, but to say one thing and mean another, and thus she creates deep ambiguities. Before we read this poem, we must understand what irony means.

Irony is a vast term. Modern culture rarely invokes earnest expression but relies on jokes, sarcasm, over and understatement and a whole range of not quite meaning what you say. That is irony. So too is Socrates’ endless statement that he is ignorant, when in fact he is asking a set of questions that lead his interlocutors to certain answers. Irony can be a lie or an encouragement. Imagine there are three of you in a conversation. Two of you are in on a secret and the third is not. So much of what gets said could be ironic, as the hidden or implied meaning will only be clear to two of you. When you watch a film or play and you know something one of the characters does not, that is irony. What the character thinks is happening isn’t really what’s happening. Irony is that gap between the stated and the implied.

Irony is a constant force in Dickinson. She constantly writes in paradox, antithesis, and juxtaposes our expectations with strange reality. Look at these examples from two of her popular poems

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.

Tell all the Truth—but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies—

We can see the way Dickinson’s irony makes paradoxical statements: success is valued by the unsuccessful, truth can only be revealed through concealment. But, it is very important that Dickinson doesn’t phrase her ideas in the way that I did. Dickinson is deeper and subtler than that. We cannot find a suitable bromide to summarise Dickinson; she is expressing the tragic irony that success means most to those who have tried and failed to be successful. It is an illusion that means most to those who are deceived by it.

So, let us return to the Dickinson poem, and trace her ironies.

Through what transports of Patience
I reached the stolid Bliss
To breathe my Blank without thee
Attest me this and this —

By that bleak exultation
I won as near as this
Thy privilege of dying
Abbreviate me this —

There are five paradoxes in this poem: “transports of Patience”, “stolid Bliss”, “breathe my Blank”, “bleak exultation”, “the privilege of dying”. Transports means something like the mild sway of John Keats, but more intense, more passionate. Samuel Johnson defined it as “Rapture; ecstasy.” It is perplexing to think of patience giving us raptures; to read this poem, we must hold that contradiction in our mind. Then, in the second line, we see that the raptures reached through patience lead Dickinson to “stolid bliss”, a dark irony of the heavenly bliss supposed to be attained through patient faith. The third line reveals that this is a grief poem—”without thee”. Someone has gone, presumably to death, leaving Dickinson with only a patience so painful it gives her agonising raptures. She is capable of “breathing her blank”, that is of surviving without hope, living without meaning, but the bliss of surviving is stolid. Attest me this, she says to her dead companion.

And this—she opens up the second stanza. The bleak exultation, the ironic triumph of her continued survival amid such grief, won her the privilege of dying, as near as this. Her life is the closest thing to death, the ultimately grim irony at the heart of this poem. Whereas Housman’s ironic air that kills transported him to the past, Dickinson’s blank breath becomes a recognition that to abbreviate her life, to reach the final transport, is a form of living, is a form, as Harold Bloom said, of “release from the despair of living on.” The poem is itself a transport of patience. Dickinson is under the mild sway of her own bleak exultation, turning despair into poetry. Like Housman, she is dead while living, dead in some stalled, stunned, neutered sense. Like him, too, she creates a poetic reality, something that cannot be abbreviated any further, that captures the fleeting moment, the shining plain, the clear ambiguity of ever running time.

Further reading

The Visionary Company and How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom

If you can’t wait to read my book about late bloomers, try the GPT now live. Ask it anything about being a late bloomer, and it gives you answers based on my book.

Use the late bloomer chat bot

The question of good taste is once again in vogue. Before Christmas, Dirt ran a series about ‘The Future of Writing’, in which Monika Woods wrote about the mediocrity of modern writing.

Subjectivity rules us all— the subjectivity of people who have bad taste.

Woods quotes Merve Emre that too many writers have nothing to say and no good way of saying it.

Tomiwa Owolade wrote in the Times this week about this philistine supremacy in modern culture, where so many adults are Harry Potter fans and read YA fiction. He quotes A.S. Byatt’s comment that adult fans of Harry Potter lack a sense of the mystery of life. Then says,

Yet confronting human nature, in all its wildness and variety, is crucial for any work of art. As Harold Bloom, the American literary critic and author of The Western Canon, once put it: “We read [the great works] to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.”

But good taste must have something to do with subjectivity. Good taste must be related to what we enjoy.

In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, Kyle Chayka, the New Yorker writer with a new book about the internet and taste coming out, defines taste like this:

taste is knowing who you are and knowing what you like, and then being able to look outside of yourself, see the world around you, and then pick out the one thing from around you that does resonate with you, that makes you feel like you are who you are or that you can incorporate into your mindset and worldview.

Chayka notes that taste is not about superficial consumption of whatever you happen enjoy, “but instead almost making it part of yourself.” Ezra Klein responded to this by saying,

I thought I could have good taste or bad taste, and I mostly thought I had bad taste… it’s relatively recent for me that I began to realize the first question is, what do I actually like and why?

The insight to take away from this (though it isn’t novel, and I’m surprised people need to hear it) is to follow your gut, find what speaks to you. A man must study that which he most affects, said Shakespeare. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, said Johnson. For autodidacts like Virginia Woolf, this was the only way to read. Her work is saturated with this principle.

Klein is reacting to the snobbery of good taste, which leads people to pretend to enjoy art for social reasons. Talking about good taste and bad taste often invokes such snobbery, as if bad people have bad taste. This isn’t true, of course. Reading Jilly Cooper or Colleen Hoover or Prince Harry doesn’t mean that you are bad. But no-one sensible can equate those books with the work of George Eliot. No-one who has read a lot of literature and, as Chayka says, made it part of themselves, would equate them.

The way we can relate personal taste and good taste is realising that taste is knowledge, as Chayka and Klein intimate but don’t say. Having good taste in wine means being able to identify what you are drinking, being able to distinguish various grapes and regions; similarly, having good taste in art means knowing what you are reading, watching, or hearing.

The better we know a piece of art, the more we can see it for it is, and not have our judgement clouded by our pre-existing feelings. The more we have read, the better we know where a new book fits. The more ignorant we are, the more likely it is that we will be dazzled by mediocrity. Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul, as Alexander Pope said.1 Good taste is accumulated through wide knowledge.

Believing that taste is a primarily personal question means believing that the canon is the canon because lots of people happen to prefer reading revenge tragedies and epic poems about Satan to reading anything else. It means believing that Chaucer is canonical because, much in the way some people prefer reading murder mysteries, many others prefer medieval stories told in iambic pentameter. Writers like Dante and Homer are not canonical because of a wide-spread personal taste for stories about the afterlife told in terza rima or because of a universal penchant for adventure stories with monsters told in hexameters. This is obviously false. The canon has been reapproved every generation because it is full of strange, unique, inventive, insightful work. It challenges us and shows us bigger things in life.

Klein gives the example of trying to appreciate classical music, and struggling to find a way in until he heard Steve Reich and Philip Glass and others. They spoke to him in a way other composers didn’t. But that was about picking between two sorts of excellence. Klein was choosing between varieties of the good. He was comparing classical composers, not picking between J.S. Bach and Taylor Swift. Eventually, I wager, after hearing enough modern minimalism, Klein will find his way into earlier music. One sure way to appreciate the canon is to trace the chain of influences backwards.

But look at the role of aspiration here. If Klein hadn’t started out wanting to appreciate classical music, listening to a lot that didn’t speak to him, he wouldn’t have expanded his taste. He didn’t only listen to his gut, he listened to his inner wish to find something better. And he spent ten months listening before he found this work. His knowledge base expanded. Taste is more than preference.

When we prioritise our own reaction to art, we assume that those reactions are about the art. But if you are misreading a piece of writing, without knowing it, your feelings will be more to do with you than with the writing, and thus not a response to the writing at all. When we misunderstand what we read, our feelings make us pay more attention to what is familiar in the writing than to what is unfamiliar. Thus believing that taste is primarily personal encourages us to not react to the writing, but instead repeat what we already think and feel. And so bad taste perpetuates itself.

Once we aspire, like Klein, to appreciate the best work, we begin to pay attention, acquire knowledge, and to see our personal reactions and deep feelings as only one important way of assessing great work. The more we can find in these great works of art, the broader the range of responses we can have. Struggling through works that are beyond us leads to new levels of understanding, new depths of feeling.

The more you sample, the better and broader your taste will be. The more you stick to what already speaks to you, the more limited and narrow your taste. Call it good taste or don’t, it’s all the same.

The current revolt against philistinism is rooted in the idea that we are taking the easy path. Woods writes about people who churn out unchallenging essays. Owolade argues against the easy passive watching of superhero franchise movies and the childish enjoyment of Harry Potter among adults. Chayka and Klein agreed that it is easier now to be a passive consumer, and the generic consumption of bland culture is what capitalism prefers. Hence people struggle to break out of the Harry Potter doom loop.

I disagree that capitalism and the internet make it harder to have good taste. The resistance of philistinism is as old as the ages. Before Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag was fighting the good fight. Before her, the Modernists and Victorians with their periodicals. Before them, Samuel Johnson said the aim of criticism was to improve opinion into knowledge. The Romans satirised philistines. And on, and on.

Listening to yourself is the starting point. But if you dislike canonical books, it is less likely that the books that you believe to be inferior are a fraud on the public than that you are mistaken. Have you really read enough to know? You must read the works that challenge and defeat you, or try. You must see what they are, even if you do not admire them. As Susan Sontag said, to understand art we shouldn’t focus on the content (whether that’s political art that tells us what we want to hear, or easy art that appeals to our genre preferences). Instead, we must be able to say how it is what it is. We must have read, seen, and heard enough to know how each new work compares, where it fits.

Listening to yourself is the route to good taste, but so is listening to other people. We catch the fire of other people’s enthusiasm, which is rooted in their knowledge. That is how we discover newer, better things, be they novels, films, symphonies, cuisines, clothes. It has never been easier to find out what are the greatest works of art ever made. It has never been easier or cheaper to read, watch, or hear them.

Some people don’t want good taste. Fine. Leave them be. There was never an easy way to have good taste. But today if you want to experience the heights of human accomplishment, you can. And much more easily than before.

The only thing stopping you, is you.

The aim is to provide introductory sessions to help you understand poetic and technique. To see how writers achieve their effects.

The aim is to provide introductory sessions to help you understand poetic and novelistic technique. To see how writers achieve their effects.

There will be two other videos in this series, coming monthly, one on sonnets, and one on sympathy, looking at Robert Hayden and Elizabeth Bishop. If you want to get the live interactive experience, I am running a salon about sonnets tomorrow, Thursday 5th October, at 19.00 UK time. You can sign up here.

Once this series is complete, I shall upload some videos for How to Read a Novel. This will all live in a new section, which you can find on the menu bar of the homepage, called How to Read Literature.

I am running the second ‘How to Read a Poem’ salon all about sonnets on 5th October.

Being wrong about books

Is it possible to be wrong about what a book means, or can we interpret them however we want, based on our own response? This question comes up in different forms in the book club, and Simon asked recently about “the game of making meaning” with literature. This game is everywhere. (The production of Pygmalion I reviewed last week hardly understood the play at all.) So today I am going to outline some principles of interpretation.

I believe strongly that it is possible to be quite wrong about what a book means, and that people often are. Think of Jane Austen, who is widely misunderstood as being about weddings and hem lines, about gentility and romance. In fact, cloase readings shows that Jane Austen hates you: she’s just subtle about it.

Of course a book means to you whatever it means to you. And one of the things that makes a book truly great is universality. It survives through time and place because it stays relevant to different people and circumstances. But that’s not the same as the idea that books can be critically interpreted however we like.

There are facts that we can know about a text. And in good criticism, knowledge comes before interpretation. As Susan Sontag said in Against Interpretation, “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” We don’t need to go quite that far, but we should know how it is what it is before we can understand what it means.

Strong and weak misreadings

There are different ways of misreading a text—strong and weak. Strong misreadings are a wholesale reimagining, a complete reinvention, such as the response of one great artist to another. Weak misreadings are mistakes, when we prioritise something we happen to already think over finding out what the words mean and would have meant in context. Many common readers who want to learn about literature are given weak misreadings under the guise of knowledge.

Take the example of The Death of Ivan Illyich by Tolstoy. You see a lot written about this book that isn’t wrong—focussing on human nature, how we respond to suffering, making the most of life—but which downplays (or ignores) Christianity. Ivan Illyich is an explicitly Christian book. That’s the whole point: it’s right there in the text. If we don’t account for that, we don’t understand what the words on the page actually mean. To put that in Sontag’s terms, what it means is then divorced from how it is what it is.

When we make such a misreading, we don’t learn from the book. And what is the point of reading a book if you are only going to find there what you already know? That’s the literary equivalent of going to a party and responding to everything you hear with, “Ah, that reminds me of something I said to my wife earlier today…”

The film Ikiru is a strong misreading of Tolstoy, utterly transforming and reimagining his story in a secular way. In contrast, finding modern notions of “making the most of your life” in Ivan Illyich is a weak misreading, much more to do with our own pre-existing ideas, than the book itself.

Weak misreadings are everywhere. How many people read Jane Eyre and think about its feminism without thinking about religion? Similarly, this essay is a good explanation of the way that thinking of Anna Karenina as a story about a romantic heroine is a mistake entirely at odds with the details of the book. Tolstoy isn’t some weepy romance writer: he’s judging you.

Another example. The Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken is often quoted as if it endorses the idea of taking the road less travelled. In fact, the wording makes clear that the very opposite is the moral of the poem. As Frost wrote:

Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

Both that morning equally lay. The paths are the same. There is no road less travelled. The whole thing is a joke about the lies we tell ourselves.

But few remember these lines, and this has been called the “most misread poem in America.” Whenever we quote this poem to mean “you should take the road less travelled” we are making a weak misreading, using it to echo something we already thought, not to understand the poem itself. We are finding the answer we already have and treating Frost like self-help or affirmation, not as art.

Again, that’s fine, just be clear with yourself whether that is what you want. If you want to learn from the poem, it doesn’t make much sense to read in way that ignores a significant part of it.

Until we have knowledge of a text, we cannot make strong readings, misreadings, or reinterpretations of it. What J.S. Mill said of history (in The Subjection of Women) is true of literature,

in history, as in travelling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history, who do not bring much with them to its study.

You are not obliged to learn from, or even about, literature. But if you do want to learn, it is best to ground your interpretation in knowledge. Books are made of words that have real meanings. We can choose to learn from them or not, but we cannot deny the choosing.