Crossing history: New England landscape in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell

This dissertation reads figurations of New England landscape in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry as emerging from conflicting historical forces, arguing that the verse tropes the tension between past and present definitions of the environment to produce original voices in the region. Following the words of speakers in this poetry leads to an understanding of what it means to live in one of the most representative as well as best represented places in America during times of significant cultural transformation. Beyond considerations of historical fact, the poetry's figurative positioning within the landscape further reveals how redevelopment that displaces formative traditions of the region allows speakers to arrive in New England as though for the first time, locating the new and authentic perspective of American literature within a historical decadence.;At first glance such a survey may appear to reproduce previous observations of landscape in American poetry. An examination of the verse, however, suggests that the speakers come much closer to achieving both a visual and linguistic priority than others have realized. Considering the most frequently analyzed verse as closely as possible within its figurative proximity to New England necessitates an overturning of engrained assumptions in the field of American letters. This project eschews a single historical framework, opting instead to read the poetry in the context of disparate historical trends based on perceived scholarly oversights. Nineteenth-century revisions in property law that encouraged industrial development help to explain the negotiation for space in Emily Dickinson's poetry. Natural and cultural decay of farmland allow Robert Frost's speakers to renew the signification of language. Returning to America's visual origins, Wallace Stevens' poetry foregrounds its rhetoric upon Ralph Waldo Emerson's "transparent eyeball," an image itself anticipated by written description. Following such exceptional renewals of the region, Robert Lowell places the tradition upon himself via the figuration of his New England family. The use of different historical means thus directs the poetry in this study to the same end, which in this particular landscape paradoxically surfaces as a beginning.