I

n 1936 the scholar Elizabeth Atkins published an article in PMLA

called “Man and Animals in Recent Poetry.” In her essay Atkins

presents evidence that “in American poetry written since the World

War, one of the most significant new developments is now seen to be the

fascination which animal life holds for the poet.” She notes that in the

literary journals she surveyed over a period of fifteen years, 236 poets

had published “earnest and philosophical poems about animals,” and

that these poems present “intimate portraiture... with fidelity of detail

worthy of the old Dutch portrait painters.” In contrast to the depictions

of animals in poetry of the Victorian and romantic periods, she argues,

this new animal poetry is “carefully literal.” With copious references to

poets and poems, Atkins argues that poetry about “literal” (as opposed

to allegorical) animals is a genuinely new phenomenon. She offers sev-

eral reasons for the rise of this new kind of animal poetry: the Darwin-

ian revolution and the awareness it brings of the evolutionary kinship

between humans and animals; the influence of Emily Dickinson; that

most readers of poetry live in cities and so feel the absence of actual ani-

mals in their lives; that World War I and the new science of psycho-

analysis have offered plentiful evidence of a “sick civilization,” which

spurs a turn to the “soundness in the primitive life of the beasts”; and

that human interest in animals is in any case “immemorial.” Echoing a

INTRODUCTION