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the speakers’ psyches relative to setting they inhabit and the means by which they perceive it.
Because I seek to consider the speakers’ relation to the landscape from a psychoanalytic perspective, getting as close as possible to both the environment and the speaker’s perception of it, Richard Poirier’s previous scholarship on Emerson also becomes rather important. As Poirier shows, Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” which embodies America’s Adamic origins, paradoxically takes shape after the written recording of it, thus foregrounding the imposition of language itself in the American attempt to experience the landscape free of prior description (The Renewal of Literature 201–203). Poirier’s conceptualization of America’s origins in the consciousness of the writer and in language offers a necessary corrective to recent studies of landscape in American literature. Elisa New’s The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight aptly reads American originality as a thwarted attempt to precede experience. However, she predicates her argument upon a reading of Emerson’s essay “Experience” as an aberrant shift from his previous fantasies of overcoming himself and the world. By contrast, Poirier’s The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections draws much closer to America’s visual and linguistic priority, finding Emerson’s trope of the transparent eyeball to be an impossible attempt at preceding its written depiction. “There may be a ‘language of nature,’ ” says Poirier, “but there is no such thing as natural language, any more than there is a national literature. It is all made up” (38). Ironically, looking back with Poirier to Emerson’s thwarted attempt at originality reveals how near the modern American poets in this study arrive at something like an original priority.
Other smaller yet still significant studies are considered when closely reading specific effects of history upon both the landscape and poetic voices. Though more localized than the aforementioned comprehensive scholarly projects, they nevertheless have broken important ground in reading the American landscape tradition. Since there are too many to mention and itemize in this introduction, they will be cited and commented upon in each chapter.