McLuhan, Marshall. ‘ The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry.’ In Eugene McNamara (Ed.), The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962 (157-168), New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1969.

My subject, the indispensability of landscape as a technique for managing the aesthetic moment in poetry, grows out of my recent study of Tennyson and landscape. In that essay, I indicated some of the Lebnitzian and Newtonian influences in bringing about the eighteenth-century concern with psychology and landscape and concluded that the central difference between romantic or picturesque poetry and modern symbolist poetry was that whereas the landscape poets from Thomson to Tennyson were engaged in manipulation an external environment as a means of evoking art emotion, after Poe, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, the symbolists turned to the manipulation of an interior landscape, a paysage intérieur, as the means of controlling art emotion or exploring the aesthetic moment. This amounted to a considerable revolution – from natural conditions for art emotion to art conditions for art emotion. (157)