OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID155crossing of seemingly natural boundaries, a process capable of reinvig-
orating lines or producing infertile or monstrous offspring. Hybrids are
mongrels, half-breeds, crosses, mules, curs, and freaks, even as they are
also new amalgamations and mosaics, strong and distinct new individ-
uals. Within cultural studies the concept of hybridity is both embraced
and contested because of this doubleness. It suggests a fruitful mixing
that somehow allows for the possibility of keeping heterogeneous ele-
ments distinct, while also retaining a noxious essentialism in implying
the existence of pure, original biological kinds. Thus hybrids can be
both vital and degenerate, politically progressive and regressive. For
Darwin, hybridity revealed something of the fundamental complexity
and fluidity of the natural world itself. Hybrids show that species are
not fixed and Platonic entities, always mating within their kind.^4 The
biological roots of hybridity thus suggest randomness and experimen-
tation, fecundity as well as sterility, biological relatedness as well as dis-
tinctness, and it is this richness that I would like to explore in poetic
representations of animal hybridity. I am interested primarily in the
most (in)fertile of hybrids—crosses or crossings between animal and
human. One could of course argue that all animal poems are a kind of
hybrid, a gesture toward or co-optation of the animal into the human
realm, but I will be looking here at those poems that most clearly fore-
ground the idea of mixing itself, that represent a creaturely hybrid.
Human interest in hybrids, in the mixing of human and nonhuman
bodies, is evident in the earliest human art. Prehistoric cave paintings
and sculptures include many representations of human-animal figures,
both humans and animals drawn over and into one another and single
representations that combine human and animal features. Such repre-
sentations defy easy interpretation, but anthropologists suggest that
early representations of hybrids reveal that art itself held the power of
metamorphosis, and that human and animal did not yet exist as sepa-
rate and distinct categories as they do in Christian understanding.^5 This
early version of the hybrid links the biological and the cultural, giving a
glimpse into what animal studies might embrace as a kind of paradisia-
cal origin. Early poems in English, like Greek epic poems, are filled with