I

n his famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” the philoso-

pher Thomas Nagel makes a sound argument against reductionist

accounts of consciousness, using as his prime example the difficulty

of imagining nonhuman animal awareness. While he assumes it is very

likely that other animals do have an experience of subjectivity, he also

argues that fundamental differences between species (such as a bat’s

ability to echolocate) make it impossible for us to know that subjec-

tivity, and that imagination is ultimately of no help. Although his claim

that we cannot know what it is like to “be a bat” is in some way self-

evident, his argument has nonetheless given credence to the idea that

imagining animal being and difference is a fool’s game that cannot lead

to insight. In a revealing footnote, however, he suggests that “it may be

easier than I suppose to transcend inter-species barriers with the aid

of the imagination.” This book has been motivated by my strong sense

that poets have been trying to transcend this barrier, as well as trying

to make sense of what it consists of and how it works, for a very long

time.^1 Indeed, this barrier has been for many poets a particular source

of inspiration, a problem for which poetry might be the means to a

solution.

This book began from of my sense that animals have long been a

crucial topic and trope of poetry, and that scholars both literary and

CODA