126THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRYBecause Smart’s poem wasn’t published until the middle of the twen-
tieth century, it reflects an aberrant moment in literary history, and it
has had virtually no influence on poets or other readers in the inter-
vening time. Instead, the cultural work of poetry for individual ani-
mals largely begins in the romantic period, during which we see the
rise of a form of lyric poem that is particularly receptive to and produc-
tive of new scrutiny of individual animals. Borrowing from Frederick
Garber’s book Wordsworth and the Poetry of Encounter, I call this the
lyric of animal encounter, and it is important because it is a mode of
poetry about individual animals that has been successful and popular;
examples of this mode continue to be written and read today. The lyric
of animal encounter is a version of the romantic lyric—it is relatively
short and in the first person, and it appears to be or allows itself to be
read as about an actual experience. The experience the poem describes
is an encounter with a specific animal in a specific time and place. The
encounter is meaningful for the speaker in terms of the animal itself;
the poem’s speaker recognizes the animal as something distinct and
living in the world, and the poem reflects as well the effect or meaning
this encounter has on the speaker. In this way, the poem’s speaker and
the animal are always in a meaningful tension. In reflecting the actual
encounter, the poem resists abstraction and generalization—resists
using the individual animal to figure the poet, a species, or animality
in general. It is in this resistance to abstraction that I see the lyric of
animal encounter as making the most of the potential of the romantic
lyric to invoke the actual animal, to explore and present liminal states,
and to approach and recognize the other while not reducing it to abso-
lute similarity or difference. Put simply, these poems self-consciously
negotiate their own inescapable anthropomorphism by beginning with
the possibility that the animal can be perceived as an individual.^13
My candidate for what a biologist would call the holotype (defi n i ng
example) of the poem of animal encounter is Emily Dickinson’s “A Bird
Came Down the Walk,” which I examine later in this chapter. The origin
of this mode is the intensified interest in animals during the romantic
period. The sheer number of poems on animals, as David Perkins has
shown, points to a genuine interest in animals as literary, philosophical,