2INTRODUCTIONShelleyan notion of the relationship between poetry and intellectual
progress in society, Atkins insists that this new animal poetry simulta-
neously reflects and anticipates a more general cultural awareness of the
significance of animals. So too Atkins’s article impressively anticipates
the recent rise of animal-oriented criticism, which is also a response to
the Darwinian revelation of our evolutionary kinship with animals.^1
There is a paradox revealed in the essay—that although animals
have been curious to us beyond the myriad ways in which we have
used them, their own interests and actual nature have always been
marginal and unrecognized. Our awareness of animals is simultane-
ously bound by human history and culture and outside of that history
and culture, which is true too of animals themselves. Yet there may
now be something new under the sun. That animal studies is now truly
interdisciplinary—and includes history, philosophy, and literary and
cultural studies, rather than being only a relatively lowly branch within
biology and psychology—means that there is a growing cultural aware-
ness of what animals mean, of what the animal as a concept means,
and that animals have some form of inalienable value to and for them-
selves. Recent developments in evolutionary psychology have contrib-
uted to this growing awareness as well, helping to narrow the seemingly
unbridgeable gap between human and nonhuman versions of sen-
tience. As Susan McHugh argues in a much more recent PLMA article,
“Animal studies researchers are united by a commitment not so much to
common methods or politics as to the broader goal of bringing the intel-
lectual histories and values of species under scrutiny.”^2 As Atkins helps
us to see, this new academic culture is late on the scene, though it is no
doubt driven by many of the reasons she identifies as giving rise to a new
kind of poetry about animals.
In addition to the belated recognition by literary scholars of Charles
Darwin’s key insights, we might also see a more general crisis as moti-
vating this renewed critical interest in the animal: that the news from
the animal world is alarmingly bad. Animal populations are under
extraordinary threat all over our planet. Habitat destruction, climate
change, poaching, and hunting have dramatically accelerated the rate
at which many animal populations are shrinking, and at which species