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III.
New England Landscape History in American Poetry: A Lacanian View offers a new approach to representations of New England in verse through a psychoanalytic examination of the poetic speakers relative to historical redefinitions of the landscape. Using rhetorical and thematic inversions found in the verse to explore the dynamic interchange between the speakers’ perception and the historically informed environment that they inhabit, I attempt to reconcile the concerns of eco-critics about the slighting of real world implications of the natural world with scholars who, since the inception of American studies, have predominantly focused on literary re-figurations of the landscape. For example, the delineation of specific historical forces, like law and farming, that shape the region of the speakers in this study heeds Lawrence Buell’s well-justified warning about the “marginalization of the literal environment” to the point where the reader “can’t distinguish Frost from Mary Oliver” (Environmental 36).
However, Bervcovitch’s claim that from its foundations, New England presents “history as rhetoric and fact entwined” (69) proves equally valid. Because the work of these four modern poets remains especially invested in rhetoric and the speakers’ perceptions of their surroundings, Elisa New’s counterpoint about an inherent bias implicit in the new historicism that may “privilege its own critical agendas over objects of its analysis” (197) warrants attention. As New argues, to a certain extent, “Locality will disclose itself only to a consciousness itself localized…” (163). In Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, William Cronon further supports the need to consider the imaginative construction of nature, explaining that the wilderness, “far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity,” exists as “the creation of very peculiar human attributes at very peculiar moments in history” (69). As Costello puts it, Cronon, along with others in his edited collection, insightfully “belie efforts to fix priority in relation to nature” (1).
Paradoxically, a historical analysis of a New England landscape undergoing modern transformations at times leads to greater insights about the individual speakers’ consciousnesses and the formation of