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

the New England landscape foregrounds the poetry around the béance. Studying the speakers’ interactions with their surroundings reveals defining rhetorical trends resulting from such self-divisions that begin to take shape in various representations of New England. Most conspicuously, the poetic speakers reveal the béance through chiasmus and antimetabole (inverted speech patterns that make clauses mirror images of each other) as well as through other kinds of thematic reflections, like the tendency for speakers in Frost’s poetry to experience nature within the domestic sphere and vice versa. Tracking these crossings at the site of the speaker’s self-splitting, which itself reflects the separation of the symbolic, suggests a pattern of inversion that begins to define representations of New England landscape in the verse.

Whereas a Lacanian analysis of poetry risks a reductive reading, with such visual and rhetorical connections located at some level in the verse of any tradition, listening to the speakers as analysands in a historically determined New England offers new insight into how specific voices emerge from the psychic interaction with their native surroundings. First of all, the speakers’ view of the landscape at the site of the béance, wherein their experience of the landscape greatly depends upon the function of the symbolic, interposes an Emersonian view of rhetoric and vision. To a considerable extent, the speakers of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell demonstrate the abandonment of Emerson’s earlier vision of the landscape as they expose the gaps within themselves and between nature and the symbolic. For example, the pathetic fallacy of the Romantic tradition for Stevens’ speakers, imaginatively linking the speaker to the natural surroundings, becomes mere rhetoric in such lines as, “It is the word ‘pejorative’ that hurts” (Collected Poetry 99, l. 1). Their identification with their surroundings becomes so invested in the symbolic that they compulsively repeat the same circular move around the gap that constitutes both themselves and their separation from nature.

Though Stevens’ verse offers an extreme example of such breaking from imaginative identification with the landscape, the other poetry also tends to cohere perception around the béance enough to warrant