4INTRODUCTIONpoetry.^9 As Marjorie Garber wonders, even in J. M. Coetzee’s powerful
The Lives of Animals, a text that continues to reverberate in the realm of
literary animal studies, and in which “the debate about the ‘lives of ani-
mals’ [is] clearly staged as a debate between poetry and philosophy... ,
why does philosophy seem so clearly to dominate, if not to win?”^10
Although Elizabeth Costello argues in her fictional lectures for the
superiority of poetry over philosophy as a mode of representing and
approaching animals, Costello herself actually engages in philosophical
discourse, just as Coetzee engages in prose fiction.
The relative scarcity of critical engagement with poetry in animal
studies is striking because the trend that Atkins identified between the
World Wars has continued; the twentieth century features an extraor-
dinary number of poems about animals. Animal poems are not a minor
or perhaps somewhat embarrassing occasion for verse but a significant
and consistent topic in poetry. Virtually all of the poets included in the
Norton Anthology of Poetry (to pick one not entirely arbitrary form of
sampling) have written poems about animals. In fact, as David Perkins
has shown, the rate at which such poems were written began to increase
dramatically during the romantic period, corresponding to the rise of
the interest in animal welfare during the same period.^11 My own efforts
at surveying and collecting what I simply refer to as “animal poems”
have left me feeling like a biologist in a rainforest, where every inquiry
reveals unexpected and overwhelming riches, new creatures and species
at every turn. It is hard to find a poet who has not written some poems
on animals, and many poets, including many great ones, have written
substantial numbers of such poems. Many commonly anthologized
poems are centrally about animals, such as “As I Ebbed on the Ocean
of Life,” “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” “The Darkling Thrush,” “The
Fish,” “Hurt Hawks,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Rime of the Ancient Mar-
iner,” “Skunk Hour,” “The Snake,” “Song of Myself,” and “Two Look at
Two.” And there are a surprising number of poets for whom animal
poems are a central part of their oeuvre, such as Elizabeth Bishop, James
Dickey, Ted Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, and James
Wright; and more recently, Margaret Atwood, Russell Edson, Maxine