The use of language in the age of advertising, sophisticated propaganda, and mass media becomes a tragedy of the commons, in which a shared resource is taxed by stakeholders to a degree that the resource is so depleted or degraded that it becomes worthless. Poetry, although it too can strain the language, has, at least since the late eighteenth century, been seen as an infinitely renewable area of the language commons. This is the case because, in the modern movement to interiority, we have managed to privatize poetic expression. Despite perennial attempts to assert a communal nature and function, poetry has remained a steadfastly private experience, written, read, and contemplated primarily in solitude.Footnote ¹ By the nineteenth century, poetry had become a profoundly private activity. This division of the language into private property – I mean this literally as well as figuratively – is the salvation of the form and a boon to the language. I argue that the typical stance from which the American poet speaks is that of the modern property owner, the private individual occupying and controlling particular physical points in the topography, and that the forms of this poetry have developed concurrently with unique American practices of land division and building technology.

In 1849, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Ruskin makes the analogy, by no means new, of the poem-as-house, announcing that “there are two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture.”Footnote ² One can read in the development of the modern house and garden many of the same values, goals, and practices that inform the development of twentieth-century American poetry. American ideals, so closely bound to property rights broadly conceived and the occupation of real property by deed-holding individuals of diverse genealogy, find expression in American verse.

Storage versus dispersal: older closed forms stored wisdom, energy, aesthetic practice, cultural prejudices; modern, more open forms, disperse it in the same way that modern dwellings and landscapes disperse energy. The modern landscape attempts to capture and disperse unlimited energy:

The old way of organizing the land never made apparent “that work and time and money are interchangeable, and that the [household] serves only to transform each of these several kinds of energy into another.”Footnote ⁴ Because poetry, with a few exceptions, lacks commodity value, it is blind to this formulation as well. Economic energy is not one of the energies poetry tends to accumulate and transform, nor does it transform cultural capital and individual imagination into economic energy. Nonetheless, poetry accrues and loses value, experiences booms and busts. The profits and losses, however, cannot be easily transferred to another stakeholder. The work, though eventually freed from the copyright holder, stays with the author forever, either relic or vibrant enterprise but always the property of the deedholder whose name appears on the book cover or in the contents of the anthology. No wonder so much American poetry takes up, in one way or another, the theme of ownership, if only the ownership of experience itself as a kind of private property.Footnote ⁵

When Bernard Duffy characterizes William Cullen Bryant's poetry as “sedulously regular in form and … equally uninspired in idea or feeling,”Footnote ⁶ he points to a reading of many of Bryant's contemporaries as well: this is a stone-walled verse which serves, in the very regularity of its sentiment and structure, to store a limited cultural capital against the threats of future degradation, echoing in language the land divisions and building practices brought by settlers to the New World. Yet if there is a kind of complacency in this poetry's order, a need to carefully nurture experience in the shadow of a future as vast as the continent, it is undercut by a current of restless desire to imaginatively inhabit this very vastness:

Bryant's theme in “The Rivulet” is picked up by Longfellow in “Evangeline”: “Far in the west there lies a desert land, where the mountains/Lift, through perpetual snows, their lofty and luminous summits,” and so on, through Oregon, Nebraska, the “Spanish sierras,” and the “wondrous, beautiful prairies,” and over all “the clear and crystalline heaven,/Like the protecting hand of God inverted above them.” We can see, in Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and others, “the exigencies of the poet's role as Emersonian ‘land-lord’ or verbal appropriator”Footnote ⁷ of the American landscape which found other expression in, for instance, the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny. Thus Emerson writes,

Compare the poet's relationship with real property that is evinced in Emerson with John B. Jackson's description of American landholding in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries:

This relationship of dwelling and dweller is not far removed from the European experience after the fifteenth century, when the practice of building masonry structures began to root inhabitants to locale and, in the case of the upper classes, to confer prestige.Footnote ⁹ This relationship finds expression in the topoanalysis of the existential house which Bachelard offers in The Poetics of Space, with an emphasis on the dwelling that is possessed over decades, even centuries, and so helps to shape the dweller's position in a historical social order in a way that the American house, sold on average once every six years, does not.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1943, Weldon Kees writes,

Cultural geographer E. V. Walter points out that a poetics of space makes little sense in the American experience. For him, “modern ‘space’ is universal and abstract, whereas ‘place’ is concrete and particular. People do not experience abstract space; they experience places.”Footnote ¹² Space, in this formulation, remains always abstract and infinite, possible but unrealized. On the other hand, places are always realized, experienced sensorily, and are bounded and unique. Although Bachelard's phenomenology takes the house, oneiric and antimodern, as its object of consideration, the house exists in the single dimension of nostalgia or daydream. Lacking a present tense, the house cannot be placed, at least not in the American sense, in which place is experienced as present, unbounded by history and always slipping away into future fact.Footnote ¹³

Bachelard seeks to divorce the poetic image, illustrated in the relationship with dwelling, from any causality other than the imagination.Footnote ¹⁴ For him, the ontology of the poetic evades (literary) analysis, existing always “a little above the language of signification.”Footnote ¹⁵ Thus the autonomy of the aesthetic image differs from the autonomous space of the dwelling as a “concentrated being” which shelters the daydreamer and embraces him in the familiar. In America, however, the experience of which is tightly bound to the market economy, to find consonance between the dwelling and the poetic image is, like so much else, to see the house and garden as at once fungible and belonging to individual, rather than historical or collective, experience. Bachelard fetishizes the house; Americans fetishize home-ownership.

The home is one of the vehicles by which space, whether Lefebvran social space or abstract geographical space, is transformed into place; poetry – art generally – is the vehicle by which imaginative space is transformed into the place of communicable perception. In both cases, there is a cognitive mapping of experience in the world. Cultural geographers Scott Freundschuh and Max Egenhofer, in their work on cognitive mapping, divide space into several types, of which environmental space, geographical space, and panoramic space seem most apropos for a discussion of American poetry. Environmental space includes houses, neighborhoods, and cities and can be subdivided into large-scale (building-sized to city-sized, requiring movement to perceive it) and small-scale (table-top-sized to room-sized, requiring a fixed viewpoint).Footnote ¹⁶ Wallace Stevens's “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” which positions both poet and reader in a single time and place, features the small-scale environmental space of a bedroom, whereas his “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” explores large-scale environmental space, the “metaphysical streets of the physical town,” from a mobile perspective. Stevens represents geographical space, which encompasses large regions and cannot be directly experienced by movement, in a poem such as “Sunday Morning,” which expands the small-scale domestic space of the dreamer to include landscapes historically and geographically distant. Stevens represents panoramic space, the experience of which also does not require movement, relying instead upon a fixed and expansive view, in a number of his poems, most notably “The Idea of Order at Key West.” However one maps it, the experience of space appears as a form of private ownership. Poetry is seen as somehow permanently inscribed – the way identity has often been inscribed in property.

Early American dwellings were built as components of a public project, within sight of one another and within earshot of the church bell, on land assigned to the individual by the community. The house was associated with a specific family and a specific plot of land, presumably forever. Having cleared the trees and dug out the rocks, New England's farmers rarely made further changes to their stone-walled fields. Inflexible houses, inflexible property boundaries, exhibiting a remarkable similarity from one farm or village plot to the next – these were the features of space, bounded by hostile nature, become place in the eighteenth century.

By the mid-nineteenth century, as farming expanded into the prairies and impersonal, quickly erected and quickly sold balloon-framed houses became the norm, the practices of rural New England were vanishing. It is not surprising that the new organization of poetic space on the page in Whitman resembles the way that American carpenter–architects reorganized space in the construction of American homes, beginning in the 1830s to solve a number of technological and social problems unique to the developing country. Perhaps the most notable new carpentry technique was the balloon frame, which could be erected by the average man, was nailed rather than joined together, and allowed for highly flexible floorplans and plane walls that could later be easily modified. Originating in Chicago c.1833,Footnote ¹⁷ following the perfecting of the mass production of iron nails, the balloon frame method provided for rapid construction with limited materials (particularly wood, a relative scarcity on the Plains). “It enabled the American husbandman to build speedily and well structures that he might not have built before,” writes Walker Field, who describes the beauty of the method at some length:

The inventive, vernacular structures that resulted from the quickness and ease of balloon framing, which allowed every carpenter to become a designer of large, free spaces, find an analogue not only in the extensiveness of Whitman, who could modify the basic frame of his poetry to accommodate all manner of new interests and perceptions, but also in the twentieth century's homemade poetic architecture of Williams, Moore, Crane, and, for all the references to Greek fragments and chiselled stone, Pound. Spurning accepted ways of joining sentences and mortising lines, the design of such a poem derives from the imagination of the builder rather than from the blueprint of the sonnet or the strict dimensions of the alexandrine. One did not have to be a professional poet to write lyrics such as “To a Poor Old Woman”:

This is a poetry that is at home, and home is where the poet actually lives, in a balloon-framed house in Rutherford, New Jersey, not a stone cottage in the Lake District. Like the modern American home, free-verse poetry à la Williams – arguably the dominant poetic mode in the second half of the twentieth century – is light, quick, easily alterable to include new thought and afterthought, anti-professional, at once common and idiosyncratic, plain, and rarely prideful.

The design of this kind of poem is open to constant revision during the process of creation. Again, one thinks of Whitman's multiple revisions and rearrangements of Leaves of Grass, the structure of which is not unlike the balloon frame building style with which Whitman would have been familiar. A century and a half later, Jorie Graham, in describing her process of composition, echoes the urgency of the nineteenth-century amateur builder: after writing “so many drafts of a poem that people would be appalled,” she compares the first version to the last to “make sure the arc of emotion has not been prettified or had the wind knocked out of it by writerly technique, by ‘good writing’.”Footnote ²⁰ Or consider George Oppen, whose operative method is “to construct a form out of no desire for the trick of gracefulness,”Footnote ²¹ or Charles Wright, whose carpenter-built line resembles Whitman's in the way it is formed not so much to house thought as to make an architectural statement.

With the obvious exceptions of Whitman and Dickinson, who seem to leap over decades of ossifying poetic practice to speak directly to, and of, the next century, one finds remarkably little poetic evidence of this changing vision of the American domestic landscape before 1900. Whitman presents the quintessential metonymy of the American experience,Footnote ²² the “leaves of grass” of a domesticated wilderness which serves, as long as the poet occupies it, as a gathering place of energy which is transformed by the imagination and dispersed – expelled! – into the public realm. His discursive lines speak to the private project of an individual freedom won by the claiming of private space. Whitman's (vitiated) transcendental embrace strikes us, naively, as communal, but his ecstatic republicanism is actually more a means of staking a private claim to heterodox political ideals and the shared experience of language. “I do not ask who you are … that is not important to me,” Whitman declares. “You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.” Although Whitman casts this activity in terms of a positive affective “adhesion,” it is at root appropriational, seizing control of the public sphere by claiming it for the poetic imagination.

The first edition of Leaves of Grass is replete with references to private property: the “old homestead,” “houses and rooms … full of perfumes,” farmers “sweating and ploughing and threshing,” “the dishes and fare and furniture,” “fireplace and candle,” “the house you live in … the rent … the other tenants,” and so on. But it is not the domestic literal that is of interest in Whitman. Rather, what makes Whitman at home in his country is his claiming of every facet of the American story. In writing it, Whitman makes a boundary around his claim, turning his imaginative engagement with experience into an object of private property distinct from other communication, such as journalism, which is meant for promiscuous public circulation and consumption. Despite its universalizing thematic, Whitman's poetry is no more a public resource than is the individual kitchen, front yard, or apple orchard. The poet, in publishing, claims ownership of the aesthetic material. One can hardly conceive of a subsequent edition of Leaves of Grass bearing the name of a deedholder other than Whitman (although it is worth noting that his name did not appear on the first edition of his book, only his picture, a kind of signature).

For Whitman, claiming – embracing – ownership often means appropriating for one's self the life-capital of others. In “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,” to cite a famous example, the experience of the individual in mourning absorbs a national grief over the assassination of Lincoln, as befits a nation that valorizes the private and treats all things public not as collective but as extensions of the individual affective state. Indeed, in the introduction to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman speaks of having “absorbed” his country, inviting his country to do the same to him. In this process, Whitman transforms geographical space into panoramic space. Lyric poetry engages in this transformation all the time, but in Whitman – and in the poetry of the next century – this panoramic space, together with environmental space, becomes a central organizing principle through which the American poet expresses the supremacy of the private individual in the engagement with public experience and resources, what Whitman calls “completeness in separation.”Footnote ²³ Just as the nineteenth century saw the rise of the land speculator, who need not be physically present on the land to claim title, Whitman feels free to claim what he wants from the American experience and call it his own.

The appropriation of public space by the nineteenth-century American poet is not unique, of course, to Whitman. One might even argue that it is the near-universal project of the American writer. Through the act of representation, as well as the fiction of representation proposed by the act of representing his own imagination, Whitman necessarily appropriates the land. There can be no such thing as “landscape” without an imaginative appropriation of land. Though the poet aestheticizes nature in a way the land speculator or the tourist does not, all impose constraints on the manner in which they and those with whom they communicate experience the land. Indeed, in America, despite our vaunted national-park system, land is rarely other than property.Footnote ²⁴

The Whitmanesque poetic line “sauntering along without fully stopping” draws boundaries and distributes energy in a radically different way than does the poetic line of his contemporaries, who are committed to the poetic landscape to which they have been assigned, just as they were historically committed to the clearly defined spaces into which their land, following the tradition of their European forebears, had been divided. In surveying his domain, Whitman decides against dividing the language into rectilinear plots, opting instead for a poetry of democratic individualism that is “loos'd of limits and imaginary lines,” which follows the imaginative lay of the land, absorbing everything into a vast catalogue which becomes “the instrument of imperial national consciousness that assimilates everything,”Footnote ²⁵ including the land itself. Although, in 1871, in Democratic Vistas, Whitman decries the excesses of Gilded Age capitalism and individualism, the “depravities of the business class” and the “mob of fashionably dressed speculators,” he explicitly places his American moment in the stage of “material prosperity” that is to precede the “spiritualization” of the national adventure. The implicit poetic endorsement of private landholding finds explicit support, of a Jacksonian color, here. Whitman contends that the great poet exists “where the future becomes present,” and in the American story the future is bound up in the land yet to be occupied. As Kenneth Burke points out, an “idealization of the present in terms of the future” lies at the center of Leaves of Grass.Footnote ²⁶ “The fruition of democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future.”Footnote ²⁷ In the American program, ownership of private land captures the future, not the present (as in a feudal state) or the past (as in the Romantic vision). Furthermore, it is landownership which mediates the relationship between the “simple separate person” and the public or the ideal of “perfect comradeship.”

In laying claim to the American landscape, Whitman transgresses the prosodic boundaries of metrical composition by which the poetic imagination was surveyed, compelling attention to the poem's boundaries themselves, as well as to what was represented within them.Footnote ²⁸ Awareness of the representation of boundaries runs deep in the American psyche, a result of the ideals of private property. The Land Ordinance of 1785 required that the unsettled territory of the new nation be divided into the six-square-mile townships and one-square-mile sections that inscribed in the American landscape our familiar network of roads, train tracks, boundary fences, and schools (the ordinance provided that Section 16 of each township be reserved for such a purpose). As Kent Ryden explains,

This description could apply to the challenges Whitman faces in the American poetic form, a challenge which continues into the twentieth century, as poets – consider James Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop – struggle to make sense of the contours of the imagination mapped by the grids of traditional prosody and, when those boundaries are reached, expressed in the freer lines and verse-paragraphs they adopted. “Sooner or later,” writes Ryden,

The landscape represented in the poetry of Emerson, Longfellow, Bryant, et al. both stores, in subject matter and prosody, a diminished European literary culture and chimes with a Land Ordinance vision of space. William Cullen Bryant's lines exhibit the regularity of New England field boundaries, but he can still

This is the American place made abstract, returned to “space” and thereby lost to personal experience. Emerson can write in “The Snow Storm” that

and we can almost believe he is describing a small-scale panoramic space, that there is more to the poetry than an imposition of a linguistic Land Ordinance grid on the abstract space of “America,” resulting not in a poetic map but a simulacrum, a meeting of land and imagination.

What is interesting is that in the twentieth century, even as the apparently clear boundaries of meter dissolved into other ways of organizing poetic expression, the impulse to the privatization of imaginative experience accelerated. Indeed, the need to forever “make it new” that urged Williams and Pound and H. D. and – well, everyone – after 1910 leads to the subdividing of the language into smaller and smaller plots, upon which the identity of the poet–owner depends, even when the poet makes claims to a collective voice (see, for example, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Marilyn Chin). Although readers are permitted onto the property, it is hard to imagine rambling around a poem as though it is one's own, the way someone might have taken a Tennyson poem as public property.Footnote ³¹ In America, the private vision, like the private dwelling, is the ideal.

The shattering of the line and its reorganization on the page in Pound, Zukofsky, Oppen, Williams, and Olson reflects a new kind of land organization and perception of space that developed in the twentieth century, particularly west of the Mississippi River. Unlike the early urban developments of the eastern seaboard, the modern western city came into being already dispersed over a wide landscape and either lacked a central focal point (Houston, Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Jose) or featured multiple focal points (Los Angeles, Denver, Minneapolis–St. Paul). This allover metropolitan development, like the allover development of prairie homesteading a generation earlier when the railroads suddenly broke open the frontier, decenters the traditional image and function of the city as a mechanism of cultural condensation and scatters energy across a widely divergent topography. This is a city that is the concept of itself – or, as Thomas Pynchon describes Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts – census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.”Footnote ³² Political scientist Alexandra Kogl sees the late modern Pynchonesque city as naturalizing efficiency for the purpose of making abstract preference more “real” to the citizen–consumer by creating, through the repetition of big-box stores, shopping malls, mega-churches, office and industrial parks, and streets that radiate into the sameness of subdivisions, the illusion of political and social boundarylessness.Footnote ³³ By reducing the amount of “wasteful” public space and anonymizing that which remains, the city-as-a-concept presents itself as an atopia and puts a premium on private, inward-gazing space.

Modern and postmodern poetry's private space, reproducing private social space, subverts the way in which private real-property rights have often, though not inevitably, led to disengagement from the public realm. Although American poetry lacks significant exchange value, this state of affairs does not remove poetry from a property system that captures and constrains so many other art forms, from painting to performance. Although there is a danger of reifying capitalism as an independent, unitary agent, the market economy, by coding all land as real estate, reduces the availability of public space and pushes everyday life almost fully into the private domain. Some poets, such as Frank O'Hara (perhaps because of his professional association with visual art), recognize the radical interiority resulting from the reduction of shared space – or is it the other way around? – and pointedly compose verse that refers to public locations. In O'Hara's case, this means the streets, subways, museums, cemeteries, and parks of New York City, “that kaleidoscopic lumber-room where laws of time and space are altered,” as John Ashbery says.Footnote ³⁴

The inward gaze that so clearly troubles O'Hara and fascinates Ashbery finds expression in the kind of poetry that, rather than transforming energy through the metamorphic pressure of Whitmanesque accumulation (a technique more aligned with notions of Manifest Destiny), gathers glimpses and hesitations into a survey of consciousness. For example, Hart Crane in 1930:

The new city, demanding a new kind of attention from its residents, is largely a function first of light-rail construction, then of street and highway construction, which began in earnest in the 1920s, permitting the fast and free circulation of citizens and commerce through newly accessible private lands. (The creation of the US Highway System by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1925 effectively removed interstate roads from the control of private local highway clubs, opening a new kind of widely dispersed public space experienced primarily while one was in motion.) By favoring the thoroughfare, this metropolitan arrangement requires a new relationship between private dwelling and public access. The Habermasian conception of a public that necessarily emerges when the “private spheres have achieved an independent existence” finds physical expression in the supervision of the thoroughfare,Footnote ³⁵ where the public briefly appears en route from one private space to another. In addition, the foci of daily life shift away from the central square, green, plaza, civic center, or business district to the seeming infinitude of private dwellings, each become, in a very real way for the resident, the center of the metropolis. There are few lonely outskirts when there is no designated center. Yet the lonely modern metropolitan citizen does not, somehow, feel bound to a community in the traditional sense. This is the complaint of James Merrill “in cloud banks well above Wall Street,” of James Wright in “an eternity of Sunday daybreak in the suburbs,” of T. S. Eliot “raising dingy shades/In a thousand furnished rooms,” and of H. D. “in these dark cells/packed street after street.” The streets in American poems are always moving outward, leading elsewhere, away from the small-scale domestic spaces occupied by poets waiting to be beckoned.

The modern western metropoles and the exurbs of the eastern seaboard discourage, or even prevent, wandering. Movement through the landscape tends to be purposeful and direct. Go to school, go to work, go to church. Go to the supermarket, go to the auto-repair shop, go to the zoo. Go to the shopping mall. Later, go home. How one goes is determined by novel formations of movement through space, which are engineered for efficiency, economistic priorities, or unconscious exercises in political authority. How one goes is most fully realized in the freeway, the design of which abandons the rationale of the Land Ordinance roadway in order to push violently across the lived, or representational, landscape.Footnote ³⁶ These newer formations result largely from the “Standard Euclidean” zoning regulations that arose following the 1926 Supreme Court decision in Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., which held that the right of municipalities to regulate land use could not be challenged under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In addition, in 1926 and 1927, the US Department of Commerce published the Standard State Zoning Enabling Acts, which among other things codified the master planning of growing municipalities. As a result, Standard Euclidean zoning was nearly universally adopted, and land was segregated into clearly defined residential, commercial, and industrial areas, creating massive urban sprawl and a legally enforced divide between domestic personal space and commercial and civic space, a situation most notably critiqued by Jane Jacobs.

One of the effects, again, of this kind of municipal regulation is to valorize the private domestic, the home and garden occupied by owners, and to devalue public space, which became increasingly abstract, stripped of the significance that attaches to more traditional – dare one say “organic” – landscapes, both rural and urban. The design of the mid- and late-century suburb, a public ordering of private space, is in many ways the ultimate denial of shared values. The suburb, particularly the bedroom community, divides land in a way that declares human activity to be primarily biological (eating, sleeping, reproducing) and, for all the cookie-cutter architecture and repetitive, efficient street design, provides physical statements of collective life.

It is hard to think of an American poet who actively embraces this vision of life or who even lives in the ‘burbs for any length of time. Most of the literary figures after the mid-twentieth century have occupied more traditional homes, either in rural areas or in older – meaning more bohemian – precincts of the metropolis. This may indicate as much about the economic, ethnic, and social status of highly literate and creatively committed individuals as about the necessary conditions for writing poetry. Nonetheless, the occupation of private space, because it remains representational in the sense that Lefebvre uses the word, increasingly becomes, for better or worse, the natural domain of poetry in the American century.

The focus of this arrangement is the citizen, a moving point in the landscape, rather than the citizenry, what Williams Carlos Williams criticized as “the crowd at the ball game,” which

or, more bitterly,

In a less cranky mood in “The Marriage Ritual,” Williams saw, at least in himself, the individual who is free to seize a small piece of the public realm for his own use:

For Williams the proprietorial gaze was nearly always outward, but the in-looking gaze of contemporary urban life, the removal of a certain socioeconomic stratum, from the street to the dwelling from which one may observe the street, is recognized by a number of the century's poets from Eliot to Ashbery, Gwendolyn Brooks to Louise Glück.

One does not immediately think of late twentieth-century American poets as rooted to the experience of American place. Yet take the case of a poet such as Jorie Graham. Her poetry springs from an almost Hegelian conception of property favoring the subject over the predicate. Indeed, Graham's poems insist on the primacy of subject, even as she persistently attempts to destabilize the subject, pressuring her own perceptions to the breaking point. One of the challenges of reading Graham is a poetic technique which shifts from book to book, in no small part because she has dedicated herself to a project involving a critique of her previous motives and strategies – a kind of periodic evolution. We have an easier time characterizing the work of Moore or Bishop or Stevens; the poems they wrote near the beginnings of their careers are of a piece with those they wrote decades later. On the contrary, Graham's verse in Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts and Erosion scarcely prefigures the extravagant lines and fractured syntax of, say, Swarm. As social geographers point out, an individual's cognitive maps of the world, those imaginative representations of the salient features of the lived landscape, develop over a lifetime.Footnote ³⁷ Nonetheless, Graham's work is marked from the first by an almost obsessive concern with locating the poet in the position of the beholder. As the heir of Eliot, Stevens, and Bishop, Graham adopts many of the strategies and thematic concerns of her modernist predecessors, including concern with the position of the speaker in the poetic moment. On several occasions, Graham has spoken directly of her epiphanic moment when, as a student at NYU, she overhead a classroom recitation of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”Footnote ³⁸ The small-scale domestic space in which Prufrock plays out his personal drama and from which he observes, if only in his imagination, the public life beyond the window, provides a model for the meta-ekphrastic beholder in many of Graham's early poems. In these she adopts the fixed position of the classical painter, relying on perspective itself to assert both an ontology and a phenomenology which she develops, ever more finely, in her later work. Bonnie Costello sees this positioning of the self as beholder, particularly in the ekphrastic works, as “the aesthetic transformation of the world as iconic design,”Footnote ³⁹ a transformation which Graham later performs as something like the beholder in the cinematic experience, in which “vision occurs in moments wrested from chaos rather than preserved in sequestered icons.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The iconic imagination, one in which, as Graham writes, “the paintbrush [taps] against the visible,” in the first decade of her published work is consonant with an understanding of the autonomous landholder so central to the American experience, who, in beholding the world, draws a bright distinction between “inside” and “outside,” private and public. The public world is beheld from a fixed perspective, a space into which

The pictorialism of poems such as “Tennessee June,” “Scirocco,” and “Salmon” harks back to that of the “stone-wall” poets but resists the lure of the imperial gaze by focussing on the small-scale rather than geographical landscape.

There is an active appropriation of the world in much of Graham's work, particularly in her first three volumes of poetry. The initial stance, which Graham proceeds to destabilize, is of the Emersonian “land-lord” gazing over the domain of what she can behold and, therefore, possess intellectually and emotionally. Hers is not “unimproved property,” the thing as it supposedly is, as in an earlier modernist formulation, but a domain that vibrates with the eager energy of one staking a claim.

In her earlier poems, Graham frequently establishes an initial position in the private dwelling or in the close confines of domestic property:

The “materialism” invoked in the title of Graham's fifth book develops into the medium by which individuals are joined to collective endeavor by the physical forms that abstract concepts assume in lived experience, a theme Whitman returns to again and again. This materialism manifests most profoundly in the reification of American democratic ideals in the form of private property. Our sociality as a nation is mediated at a basic level by notions of landownership, of neighborliness, and of communal boundaries that are both physically demarcated by fences and so on and made available by the representations of community survey plats. Just as land makes desire into a commodifiable entity, poetry makes perception non-ephemeral. Graham has written of how the traditional poetic line and metaphorical language embody – even enact – a troublesome imperialistic mode of engagement with the world. She addresses concerns about the ways in which we mentally, as well as physically, occupy the world, often by an unacknowledged force.

The later Graham lyric, splintered, hyphenated, parenthetical, acts to concentrate and disperse energy. The blanks, or absences, in her lines disrupt the illusion of a stable ontology. For Graham, topography is not an objective correlative; rather, from topography, large and small, she abstracts a “theoretical correlative” of material experience, so that we “[l]earn what the great garden – (up, up you go) – exteriority, exhales.” Perhaps more than any poet in the last century, Graham makes a new kind of place, a substitution of “nowhere” for “there,” beyond the evaporation of the geographic by language poets. Hers is a virtual place befitting the movement beyond interiority per se to the virtual interiority of the dawning information age, which exists the way that the “private property” of Second Life or The Sims exists: invested with real significance, infinitely expandable, without substance. Graham points us to poetry's challenge in the twenty-first century to maintain imaginal presence within a cultural experience that has been progressively divorced from the physical exigencies of the American landscape as historically conceived.