A Strangeness in Common: Trespass, Drift, and Extravagance in Robert Frost

Abstract

While recent work in lyric theory has put the generic category of the lyric into radical question, less attention has been paid to how lyric poets employ the instabilities of figuration and reference to critical, and ultimately social, ends. Taking as a test case the most popular poet of a regionally authentic American lyric, Robert Frost, I argue that Frost uses techniques of lyric voicing to critique the very means by which persons appear as familiar individuals, of a sociality or place, and therefore worthy of certain liberties and property claims. I draw upon Frost’s early New England poems, his relationship with Edward Thomas, as well as his final public lecture, “On Extravagance” to show how he links “drifts” in reference and cumulative “shifts” in sound or sense to the lived experience of transience, particularly within the context of rural economies. Frost allies the vocation of poetry and lyric form not with a rugged isolationism but a more conditional notion of freedom, one that forms across a variety of egoisms, boundaries, and moral or ethical values.