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poet’s identity. Though Robert Lowell overtly worked his autobiography into the region throughout Life Studies and For the Union Dead, as chapter 4 reveals, the greatest effects of his self-reporting occurred when he inserted tropes of his family history into a New England setting through figurative reinvention as well as thematic recollection of childhood experiences in the voice of an adult.
These poets and their speakers, like the historical landscape and its figuration, may often prove interchangeable. Nevertheless, this study focuses much more upon the identity represented in the literature as opposed to the poet’s biography. In the actual poem, more than anywhere else, the speaker encounters the lyrical power of the landscape. It of course remains worthwhile to know that Dickinson had two lawyers in her immediate family, or that Stevens read works of Emerson rather early in his formal education. Such observations are duly noted and at times expanded upon. Beyond putting the verse in the general context of the time period in which the poet lived, however, this examination leaves deeper questions concerning the poet’s personal and familial origins unexamined. Robert Lowell, with the personal investment of his family history in New England, is really no exception. The imaginative rendering of his autobiography takes precedence. This is not to slight the importance of biographical investigations. Especially in such representative American poetry, where the line between poet and speaker becomes almost negligible, the stones of New England, figuratively linked to the poetic speakers in representations of the region, cry out for greater biographical connections to the poets as well. Nevertheless, to respond to a specific poem in this study by relating how Dickinson’s father practiced law would mean missing the greater legal trends of the poet’s time; the life of the poet would be read at the expense of the poem and, as importantly, the essential effects of the psyche in relation to the landscape.
Though a psychoanalytic reading predominantly links the speakers in this study, the historically informed landscape in which they find themselves positioned continues to remain important, dynamically connected to the formation of the speakers’ voices. In this respect, New England Landscape History in American Poetry: A Lacanian View endeavors