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allowing the function of language to reveal the speaker’s essential positioning at the threshold between nature and the symbolic, which will be referred to as the béance. Constructions like chiasmus and antimetabole, as well as thematic inversions, surface throughout the poetry as figurative means to psychoanalytic ends. Most importantly for this study, these reversals exemplify the visual reciprocity between speaker and landscape, ultimately showing the effects of the Lacanian mirror stage as well as the function of the gaze. Ironically, closer consideration of psychic effects through an analysis of rhetoric consistently reveals the effects of historical forces that shaped the landscape inhabited by the speakers. To that end, this examination of these speakers’ voices also extends and redirects Paul de Man’s reading of the landscape as a replacement of the poet’s muse, wherein the specific environment in the poem becomes the physical embodiment of a psychic projection as New England mirrors the subject’s inherent self-division.
The Lacanian mirror stage, especially as a point of entry into New England poetry, offers further investigation as to how, in American verse, the poet’s psyche becomes the poem (Gelpi x).2 Applied to poetic speakers instead of actual poets, this stage locates the central tension of the verse in the inherent self-division of the subject at the site of the béance. According to Lacan, the subject’s alienation in the separation between nature and the symbolic becomes the site where “death makes itself felt” (The Seminar. Book II 210). Much of the lyrical power of the different speakers derives from their rhetorical inversions, which are indicative of the mirror stage. As they visually cross the symbolic New England landscape, they reveal an inherent ego aggression, whereby they begin to cross themselves out. The poem itself becomes principally informed by the speaker’s psyche, a process predicated upon what it means to look for ego recognition in local surroundings. The Lacanian approach thus intends to provide an extended analysis of the process by which American verse predicates much of its power upon the formative effects of the unconscious. Insofar as nature itself remains an imaginative construct, according to Lacan,3 the mirror stage in this study additionally calls attention to the fantasies of nature projected upon the environment