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

their distinct voices in the region, while scrutiny of the speakers’ psychoanalytic development through their use of language often leads to dramatic revelations about the effects of their physical surroundings. As Costello explains of the latter, though “rhetorically oriented criticism” first and foremost offers “a series of motivated strategies and structures,” it nevertheless “can involve real world concerns” insofar as it considers “abstraction as entangled with substance” (14). Costello’s Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry, which builds on New’s study, provides an especially apt foundation with which to further consider the exchange of fact with figuration in modern New England verse. As Costello’s text reveals, modern American poets foreground the illusion of an established landscape structured in opposition between “mastering spectator and expansive scene” (Shifting Ground 8). They continually “configure spaces that feature the sense of flux” (1), a “reciprocity without fixed priority” (9). One of Costello’s successful insights into the rhetorical demonstration of such reciprocity in the poetry of Frost involves chiasmus. This proves his “master trope” (23), exemplifying how “Crossing (as mirroring, circling, reversing exchanging)” becomes a means to express “the dynamic of parts” in the relationship to the landscape as opposed to “the prospect of the whole” (24).

Extending Costello’s consideration of rhetorical inversion to speakers in the work of the four poets in this study in relation to psychoanalysis and landscape history offers a new method by which to explore the formation of individual voices in New England, showing how they cohere, yet resist “the prospect of the whole” as a psychic demonstration of the inherent division within themselves. What proves rhetorically true for Frost, according to Costello, with chiasmus allowing “the human mind to seek its reflection in nature” (26), becomes applicable from a psychoanalytic perspective to the visual mirroring seen in the work of various poets in this study. Such a focus further reveals how a given locality, as New explains, surfaces “to a consciousness itself localized” (163). A Lacanian view of the interaction between the subject and his or her surroundings necessitates the close reading of rhetoric initiated by Costello,