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their surroundings. The historical foundations they use remain important, perhaps much more so than in other such psychoanalytic studies, but they are nevertheless subservient to their figurative designs.
Exploring this new consciousness, from what can be considered the beginning of modern American poetry in the mid-nineteenth century with the verse of Emily Dickinson through the mid-twentieth century with the verse of Robert Lowell, by looking at the poetic speaker instead of the actual poet presents a shift in the critical perspective of the American literary imagination. A Lacanian approach enables a greater scrutiny of the speakers’ unconscious by more closely considering the function of language relative to the voice that articulates a subjective position in the landscape. Paradoxically, looking more to the speaker on the page than to the poet tends to move the poem closer to the claim upon New England, better capturing the imaginative spirit of the letter used to figuratively re-create the landscape. Rather than imposing an arbitrary analysis on speakers in modern New England verse, such an examination appears warranted from the actual poets’ respective aesthetic beliefs. Consider the similarity between these poets’ personae and their figuration of the landscape. Dickinson, whose poem heading the introduction cites the willed act of using the environment as a trope, similarly makes the same observation about herself: “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person” (Letters 176.). Robert Frost, a poet originally from California, performed the part of a quintessential New Englander both in his life and his verse, acquiring farms and acres of land in New Hampshire and Vermont as he filled his poetry with figurative performances regarding claims to the regional landscape. In assessing the topography of “The Mountain,” for example, his speaker responds with the aforementioned playful ambivalence about the temperature of the mountain, commenting that “all the fun’s in how you say a thing” (Collected Poems 48). Wallace Stevens, who lived a double life working both as a businessman in the prosaic field of insurance and as arguably the most imaginative American poet of the twentieth century, created landscapes—foregrounding their rhetorical constructions—that were inhabited by speakers quite distanced from the