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

study allows them to articulate the effects of their surroundings. Just as Lacan privileged the analysand as the one who does most of the work in analysis (Evans 9), this text attempts wherever possible to highlight, through a close reading, what the speakers are actually saying about their place in the region. As Chris Fitter mentions in Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory, criticism should, as a rule, objectively distance itself outside the limitations of its subject matter to better understand the world in which it has been created (2–3). However, the poetry analyzed here grounds itself so deeply within New England culture that more often than not, one line or even a particular word shifts the experience of the historical trajectory in the region. Wherever possible, every attempt is made to see the landscape through the eyes of the speaker. While this involves examining various historical facts and trends as well as considering the poet’s biographical position in New England where relevant, the principal focus remains on the verse itself. Good scholarship always reads primary source material closely and then adeptly summarizes conclusions as it builds upon new insights. While following this general approach, I try to err on the side of caution, keeping my central analysis confined to the figurative limits of the poem. As shown in each chapter, others who have analyzed the verse typically make critical oversights when they look away from the poem’s words towards preconceptions about theory or towards each critic’s own preconditioned understanding of American literature.

By listening to the speakers rather than the authors who created them, this study further seeks to avoid over-determined biographical assumptions about the subject matter. As the reader takes the role of analyst, closely listening to and observing the words and actions of the voices in the poetry, patterns slowly begin to emerge that lead to greater conclusions about the psychological construction of the speakers and the landscape in which such a construction gets expressed. To “See—New Englandly” comes to mean voicing common human attributes, like desire, in the context of a particular shared region informed by various temporal developments. The symbolic, understood by Lacanian psychoanalysis as