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

such as in his poem “The Mountain,” in which the speaker sums up the temperature of the water on the spring near the top by saying:

Far from diminishing the importance of examining the landscape in the poetry featured in this book, the slight yet significant figurative play upon the speaker’s New England surroundings calls for closer critical analysis.

Of all the settings to examine at this time in the literary tradition of the United States, New England proves especially significant. Seminal in the foundation of the nation’s art as well as its politics, this region became the first to experience a shift from an agrarian to an industrial society by the middle of the nineteenth century. The highly influential Massachusetts State Court, for example, set several precedents for America in the early to mid-nineteenth century that sanctioned the economic development of public and private land. New England farmers, unable to compete with the modern cultivation of the American west, were the first in the nation to abandon the Jeffersonian ideal. Further, the regeneration of the New England woods and farmland through its countless cycles of past development subjected the region to a recurring process of renewal and decay. By affecting the speakers who inhabited the landscape, these factors helped account for the origins of modern New England poetry perhaps as much as influences from a previous literary tradition. As the speakers looked to the landscape, they sought to not only resolve their subjective splitting or division, but also to reconcile the transformation of their natural surroundings and sometimes even the loss of their claims upon the region.

Examining a human presence in the landscape thus attempts to localize the varying effects of New England history while considering the psychoanalytic development of voices as displayed through their rhetoric. Rather than impose an analysis upon the speakers, this