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Considering the positions of speakers in the landscape thus allows the reader to experience the poem in its original setting. Because speakers in the verse of each of the four poets inhabit the landscape at different times and locations throughout the region, they interact with environments that vary in their historical formation. Furthermore, historical approaches to the landscape vary in an attempt to offer revised readings of the poetry. Ironically, in the absence of a single historical analysis in over a century of verse, the individual responses of the speakers to a diverse and constantly changing landscape from a psychoanalytic perspective most unifies the variety of voices heard in the region. Their rhetorical crossings at the threshold of developments in the landscape diverge considerably, ultimately accounting for the defining tension in their respective verse in which they articulate their subjective positions in New England. Nonetheless, their individual responses to the béance relative to the historical trends that affect their surroundings demonstrate striking similarities. Their shared perspective, which attempts to see the environment as if for the first time and without human agency like Emerson’s idealized eyeball in their rhetorical and thematic crossings of the New England landscape, ultimately makes them “pupils of the gorgeous wheel” (Stevens, Collected Poetry 99, ll. 26–27), psychologically reflecting their experience of the gap between nature and the symbolic.
In chapter 1, “Symbolic Self-Possession: Legal Crossings in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson,” I discuss how changes in nineteenth-century New England property law transformed the landscape at thresholds in the region where the poetic speakers exemplify the effects of a Lacanian mirror stage. Through chiasmus and antimetabole, Dickinson’s speakers articulate a visual inversion or mirroring predicated on Emerson’s paradoxical textual presence in his attempt at transparency. In crossing a small but significant location in New England, they tend to foreground their subjective splitting as they cross themselves out, consistently voicing their own demise by making, as Lacan described, their own “death felt” (Seminar. Book II 210). By looking closely at the consequences of language in the speaker’s environment, the reader