The Poetics of Exile and Nation: Language, Landscape, and Identity in Yeats, Eliot, and Frost

Abstract

This paper examines how W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Frost engaged with the intertwined themes of exile, nation, and language, using poetry as a medium to negotiate questions of identity and belonging in the early twentieth century. Yeats, writing against the backdrop of Ireland’s struggle for independence, rooted his work in myth, history, and national landscape, transforming poetry into a vehicle for cultural revival and political imagination. Eliot, an American who made his career in England, exemplified the figure of the intellectual exile, using fragmented forms and polyglot allusions in The Waste Land to capture the dislocation of modernity while simultaneously reshaping Anglo-American modernism into a cosmopolitan project. Frost, by contrast, remained deeply anchored in the American landscape, employing regional settings and vernacular speech to articulate national identity while demonstrating that the local could embody universal human concerns. Together, these poets reveal how geography—whether national, transnational, or local—shaped poetic form and meaning, turning exile into a creative force, nationalism into a cultural imperative, and language into both a rooted and experimental resource. By situating Yeats, Eliot, and Frost within a comparative transatlantic framework, the study demonstrates that their poetic geographies intersected in complex ways, showing modernism as both rooted in particular places and responsive to the displacements and exchanges of a rapidly globalizing world.