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

by the respective poetic speakers, offering a necessary corrective to possible biases from strict eco-critical readings of the verse. As Cronon explains:

Following the earliest of inquiries into the relation between landscape and the individual writer,⁴ the historical transformation of the environment surfaces in this study through the speaker’s imaginative perception of nature and the culture he or she inhabits. Granted, American poetry hardly has a monopoly on this kind of psychoanalytic interchange between individual experience and the natural world. The imaginative and historical renewal of their surroundings played out in the relatively isolated region of New England, however, has perhaps allowed these speakers greater psychic access to their re-created surroundings. Emerson prophetically awaited not just an American poet, but a poet able to perceive the exception of America, the place he called “a poem in our eyes” (Essays 465). The relative newness of the country further compelled poets, under the tutelage of Emerson, to inhabit their creation. The true lesson of Emerson’s essay “The Poet” is nothing less than for the writer to make himself into the greatest poem. Lacking any established tradition save the originality of the country, Emerson concluded that for America, “Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical” (466). To arrive at an authentically new consciousness, the individual’s imaginative rendering of the American scene remains rather paramount. The history of New England, though grounded in fact, takes on figurative meaning in the poetry. As discussed in chapter 3, Richard Poirier’s definition of environment in American literature perhaps best captures the significance of New England as it is represented in the particular verse of this study, relating the principal struggle of American writers not to the more established European tradition, but instead to style itself. In this respect, the speakers of Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and Lowell cross the same landscape, forming new voices as they reckon with various historical forces and different ways of seeing