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the claim of an emerging pattern. One way of understanding this position in the New England tradition is by reading the consequence of Stevens’ “First Idea” in his speaker’s rhetoric as a thwarted attempt to inhabit Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” arguably the site of the most primary vision in a New England region that can be taken as the fundamental idea of an imaginative first priority in the American landscape. Images of circles as well as eyes surface in Stevens’ verse, figuring as points of origin around which speakers and words themselves revolve. Rhetoric thus spots Emerson’s elusive as well as illusive transparency, rendering an original attempt to describe the speaker’s position in the landscape ineffective. As discussed more fully in chapter 3, Richard Poirier’s reading of Emerson reveals that Emerson himself failed to originally inhabit such an idealized blankness, insofar as the very rhetoric Emerson used to describe his transparency precludes his attempt at visionary transcendence. Subjected to the Lacanian gaze that remains predicated upon a landscape preconditioned with earlier attempts at priority, Stevens’ speakers make “the visible a little hard / to see” (Collected Poetry 275, ll. 21–22), foregrounding their rhetoric within the figuration of the same space, or the same way at looking at that space, that preceded them with Emerson. Though not as visibly affected as in Stevens’ poetry, speakers in the verse of Dickinson, Frost, and Lowell nevertheless find themselves ultimately subjected to the gaze constructed by the symbolic, attempting to reach the illusion of becoming the first inhabitants to arrive in the landscape. As they do so, they ironically follow Emerson’s model by confronting their own rhetorical division.
In addition to the perceived influence of Emerson, historical forces, such as property law in Dickinson’s poetry and shifts in regional farming in the poetry of Frost, render the voices of speakers who interact with the landscape unique in their response to the béance that universally defines the human experience of nature as well as of the symbolic. Even though these voices vary, given the historical trend that in part defines them within the period from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, they share a similar response to the experience of the gap in what can be