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

to juxtapose a more specific analysis as to how modern changes in the New England region transformed the experience of poetic speakers than previous investigations into imaginative conceptions of the American environment. Curiously, the modern changes that reshape the perception as well as the experience of New England strain and, at times, even divide the landscape at the site of the speaker’s béance, wherein the formative lyric tension emerging from an inherent self-splitting at the threshold between nature and the symbolic parallels a temporal contradiction of setting. The modern disruption of historically established surroundings thus reflects the poetic speaker’s internal disruption and vice versa, warranting a close analysis of the interchange between landscape and psyche.

New England speakers thus mediate their perception of the natural world as well as the historical development of that world in order to arrive someplace original in their verse. Critics of American literature have often visited the historic New England that the more successful poetry here foregrounds. Fortunately for literary study in general, there is always more ground to cover. Regarding this particular examination, some of the most astute scholarship has surprisingly left much terrain considerably unexplored or misunderstood. To a certain extent, what follows reveals that such oversights and misunderstandings derive in part from the failure to consider, at the closest possible level, the formative origins of the voices representing the landscape. The respective histories of each of the four poets’ speakers have been selected based on a perceived gap in the scholarship of New England landscape in verse, and they serve as necessary correctives to specific historical forces that have been taken for granted in how they affect the verse. Far from exhaustive in accounting for the tension derived from the figuration of both past and present New England, each chronicle nevertheless helps to understand the speaker’s voice within the specific time and place that it is heard in the landscape. What follows is a small but significant attempt at a critical revolution, turning over assumptions about landscape and poetry so entrenched in the American tradition that they have been taken for granted. More than a few seminal readings of the poetry resurface in this