SOURCE: Mack, Anne, and J. J. Rome. “Marxism, Romanticism, and Postmodernism: An American Case History.” South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. 3 (summer 1989): 627-30.

In the following excerpt, Mack and Rome offer a semiotic analysis of the title and opening passage of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

What comes to us as the title, the prefatory “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” is a set of words which, even if we regard them as a single word string, are by no means self-identical. An initial reading may legitimately ask, for example, whether the third word is a common or a proper noun, and hence whether the “stopping” referred to is a casual “stopping by” at the Woods's house, or whether it is a “stopping alongside” a stand of trees. To say that the former reading is eliminated by the first line of the poem is merely to say...