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Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture and David Foster’s Thoreau’s Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape. These texts especially delineate how environmental history gets figured into nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature. Furthermore, they effectively localize the history of a region that at times remains a historical relative to Europe. As Bercovitch explained, “in all major aspects, New England was an outpost of the modern world from the start” (31).
Aside from a specifically American historical perspective, Paul de Man’s The Rhetoric of Romanticism also provides an essential foundation for this analysis. In its consideration of how the landscape replaces the muse for the romantic poets, this text invites further investigation as to the identification process by which the landscape reflects the psyche of more modern poetic speakers. De Man insightfully creates a more imaginative space from which to consider the formation of voices in this study. While history remains important to the shaping of any landscape tradition, his work invites a modern American perspective insofar as it leaves the interpretation of the environment up to the poet/speaker. In this respect, perhaps no recent scholarly text on American landscape has proven more relevant to this current undertaking than Bonnie Costello’s Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry. In this close reading of modern American verse, Costello begins to reconcile the recurring paradox of environmental studies, which states, “we are a part of nature, and that nature is part of our construction” (1). As she importantly argues, the disparate views of the landscape can be seen in the ambiguity of the physical environment itself, which exists as both “a given and a referent” (9). Her groundbreaking rhetorical attention to landscape, especially in the trope of chiasmus in the verse of Frost, provides an effective means by which to explore the psychic interchange between speakers and their New England surroundings in the verse of other poets as well. Costello’s definition of landscape in the context of modern poetry as “the shifting concept of constantly changing human arrangements of the visible environment” (9) provides a necessary point of entry to begin a closer examination of