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

Just like with the history of farming in the poetry of Frost, other critics have made observations in Lowell’s poetry similar to the one presented here, but such preexisting insights warrant further qualification and redirection. The plot line running through the New England region, which links the symbolic function to Lowell’s experience of Oedipal drama, has never before been fully delineated. The concluding chapter of this text discovers such a line extending through the tension formed out of the béance experienced by the poet-speaker whose identity, figured in the form of an unresolved question of his symbolic position, becomes rooted in the New England landscape. Though focusing primarily on Life Studies, the book where Lowell most directly and successfully connected his autobiography to his own physical origins, a further examination of For the Union Dead near the conclusion of this study reveals the figurative limitations of using the New England landscape to create an original voice. Quite fittingly, Lowell’s farewell poem to the city of his childhood, which appears at the end of this collection, returns to Boston Common, the location of Emerson’s transformation into the transparent eyeball. This follows a trend present throughout his personal poetry in which Lowell attempts to reduce his life as closely as possible to its origins by embedding it into the physical environment of his childhood. Such a reduction demonstrates a tendency towards attempted self-erasure in the landscape, even as it is resisted by the speaker, who inscribes himself into his surroundings through his own rhetorical project. “Skunk Hour,” for example, paradoxically follows Emerson’s model of the eyeball through a thwarted claim of self-annihilation:

Through the region examined, Lowell’s main poetic speaker ultimately reveals a personal and creative struggle through which an original voice emerges in New England.

Lowell thus makes an apt conclusion for this study of speakers subjected to various historical forces relative to their individual psychoanalytic responses. By articulating their respective places in New England, they voice their personal psychic tension while simultaneously calling