“Wire with something in it from men to men”: Robert Frost, the Rural Telephone Network, and the Poetics of Eavesdropping

Abstract

abstract: While many celebrated the rise of electronic communication, some saw it encroaching on honored social customs or beloved listening practices. Robert Frost was one of the latter, and in his 1916 Mountain Interval , he regards the telephone as an evocative antagonist. In this article, I trace his thought and writings from the poetics of telephonic eavesdropping to the spatial sociality of the telephone network. More broadly, I recognize Frost as an exemplar of a counterculture that sought to reconstitute the aesthetics of listening in and through the silences of modernism’s emerging electronic technologies.