New England Landscape History in American Poetry: A Lacanian Vie ...

game (Collected Poems 39–40), so too do Stevens’ speakers confront the previously existing vision of Emerson to discover, as exemplified by the title of one of Stevens’ poems, “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating.”

The fourth chapter, “A Question Mark in the Landscape: Robert Lowell as New England Artifact,” examines the consequence of the poet identifying himself as the speaker, inhabiting a region informed by family history. By closely associating with the life of the poet in the mid-twentieth century—after various attempts to figure New England historical traditions into poetry by the speakers of Dickinson, Frost, and Stevens—Lowell’s principal poetic speaker creates a new voice through his personal claim upon his New England origins. Such autobiography nevertheless reiterates the subjective splitting in the béance between the symbolic and nature. Like the speakers of Stevens, Frost, and Dickinson before him, Lowell as speaker locates a temporal discrepancy between the New England landscapes of the past and the present. Also like these other speakers, he demonstrates this gap (as well as his own inherent self-division) within thematic inversions and rhetorical crossings.

However, Lowell as speaker, rather than merely internalizing and responding to outside historical forces shaping his environment, directly acts upon a region principally transformed by his subjective positioning. In this respect, Lacan’s conception of the symbolic father can be considered the poet’s actual father. A close Oedipal reading of Life Studies shows how the rhetoric derives its key tension from following the father’s location in the New England landscape, which is owned by the family and even symbolically re-created within the speaker’s childhood home. As the only remaining heir in his family history, Lowell reveals his current conflict as one between a mother whose family of origin appears more firmly placed in New England and a father whose ancestry never quite fit securely there. Lowell (as an adult poetic speaker) attempts to reconcile this division in his childhood memory, absorbing the tension between his parents within their New England home. His temporally displaced position in his New England family, as well as in key locations in the modern regional landscape, in turn makes him a spokesman for a New England domestic history in the middle of the twentieth century.