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

considered the same New England region, relatively speaking. The gap between the subject and nature as understood through Lacanian theory unifies the rather disparate speakers in this study as much as the presence of traditional depictions of New England or any shared examples of flora or fauna. The closer the speakers in proto-modern and modern New England poetry come to realizing their own positions in the landscape, the more they tend to reveal their own psychic splitting that underpins the principal tension of the poetry. Nevertheless, their interaction with a loosely shared sense of setting subjected to modern transformative forces significantly factors into a psychoanalytic reading of their visual and rhetorical movement, forging a dynamic relationship between the New England speaker and his or her landscape.

More than merely exemplifying Lacan’s conception of the subject’s psychoanalytic makeup, the ego formation of these poetic speakers in their surroundings (as defined by new shifts in the historically determined landscape as well as by shifts in how the landscape gets perceived) reveals the development of a distinctly modern New England verse tradition. Starting with Dickinson’s poetry, written during the New England Renaissance, both the experience of the tension around the béance and the ways in which the various speakers seek to resolve it mark a new rhetorical beginning through various attempts to reconcile the past with the present in which they lived. Dickinson’s speakers particularly begin to exemplify how, at times, what most linked these disparate voices to each other was their rather tenuous relationship to New England, especially given the biographical fact that all four major poets in this study called the region home. While the poetry does reference the region consistently enough to constitute a claim for a specific locality influencing the subject matter, the modern rhetorical complexity of the verse frequently suggests, as in the poem at the beginning of this introduction, that New England served as a means to signify the actual environment as much as a stylistic instruction of poetry for the speakers in these poems. Even the work of Robert Frost, who most firmly grounds his poetry in a distinct New England setting, is less concerned with the actual topography than with the discourse arising around the subject,