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

this study reveals that speakers in his poetry arrive at an authentically sounding New England voice in the context of a literary and historical New England landscape tradition than has previously been realized.

Rather than focusing on the effects of such historical forces as farming and law on the region, chapter 3shows Stevens’ speakers looking as closely as possible to the origins of perception as manifested by the progenitor poet of the New England landscape, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Contrary to Frost’s poetry, Stevens’ verse foregrounds the symbolic functioning around the béance, rendering the surroundings much more a-historical. In this respect, the speakers in Stevens’ work serve as an extreme example of the irreconcilable division within themselves as well as between nature and the symbolic. Through rhetoric, they attempt to arrive at this opening and realize the imaginative transparency of Emerson. Like their predecessor, however, Stevens’ speakers attempt to reach a visual transcendence gets thwarted at the site of the béance.

Though they seem to circumvent the kind of local New England history seen in the verse of the three other poets in this study, Stevens’ speakers ultimately prove themselves essentially regional in their attempt to disappear. Like Emerson, they confront the paradox of textual transparency, rhetorically outlining the seminal visual tradition that defines them. The béance thus becomes the locus of vision in Stevens’ poetry and consequently can be understood as the site of the tension that drives a recurring lyric voice. The rhetorical movement around the eye, which Emerson considered the “first circle” (Essays 403) from which all consequent perception of the phenomenological world followed, marks an important beginning in modern American poetry. The figurative realization of an imagined a priori reality, exemplified by Emerson experiencing his transparent eyeball while crossing Boston Common, comes to retroactively identify the essence of an American poetic voice with New England. Rather than presenting the fantasy of a farmland untouched by previous labor, as seen in the verse of Frost, Stevens’ verse attempts to envision transparency itself as if for the first time. Just as Frost’s speakers in the poem “Mending Wall” take delight in playing the construction of the historical landscape with others who have worked the land as a kind of