The Hallucinatory Landscape in Twentieth‐Century American Poetry

Abstract

EOGRAPHER RICHARD SCHEIN DEFINES THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY tradition of mapping the cultural landscape as a "tangible, visible entity, one that is both reflective of and constitutive of society, culture, and identity" (660). Schein traces a genealogy of the term that finds geographers engaged in reading the American landscape as gendered, class-based, politicized, and aestheticized, culminating in Peirce Lewis's claim that the "human landscape is our unwitting autobiography" (12). In Schein's reading, the landscape can "be envisioned as an articulated moment in networks that stretch across space" (662), forever in flux because culture is forever in flux. In the American experience, this shifting network belongs to a discourse that privileges individualism, late-capitalist democracy, and, I might add, a literalizing religiosity. Schein goes on to point out that in "our day-to-day lives, lived in ordinary vernacular landscapes, we take the tangible, visible scene for granted, especially as an ensemble" (663). This vernacular landscape is the American discourse materialized and naturalized.Those who inhabit-and are interpellated by-this landscape with the recognition of their positions in the American discourse are challenged to maintain a coherent subject identity. This challenge is met in many ways: insanity, addiction, super-spirituality, flight-and art. Poetry in particular, despite the massive assaults of postmodern theory, maintains a reliance on subject identity to accomplish its work. It is hardly surprising that American poetry so often engages with problematic or alternative landscapes, including what I am here calling the hallucinatory.