| Current developments in picture theory provide a useful methodology to investigate the highly charged "pictures" of houses, tombs, and monuments found in modern and contemporary American poetry of the landscape. While much has been written concerning the effect of regional landscape in such poetry, little has been written about the terrain as expressed by the visual ruins which characterize it. I argue that a major strain of American nature poetry, represented by modern poets such as Robert Frost and Marianne Moore, and more contemporary poets like Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, and Elizabeth Macklin, pictures ruins not only as a subject but also as a creative strategy for re-imagining the pastoral mode.;Drawing on genre theory, I show how key elements in ancient Greek pastoral (as represented by Theocritus and Virgil) have been transformed into self-conscious pictures by modern poets who construct flat, painted surfaces of pictures of houses in order to create places of stilled and silent retreat for their readers. The poems I examine are self-consciously aware of this picturing activity, and re-invigorate the pastoral mode as a dynamic, meaningful way in which to explain the tension between self and world. |
