194CODAHaving completed my sampling of poems, it behooves me to state
plainly my key insights. First, it is possible to approach and reflect some-
thing about actual animals and our experience with them in poetry.
Animals in poems are not always or entirely allegorical or symbolic.
They are not always just another way for us to talk about ourselves. The
process of reflecting nonhuman animals in poetry can help us to see,
understand, admire, and even revere them. Second, there are a number
of different ways of thinking about animals. We see them as categories
and individuals and as mixes of categories. We gain knowledge from
moving between concrete particulars and abstractions. We feel we know
something essential when we identify a category and when we feel we
have found something distinct—both are valuable forms of knowledge
and both are limited and limiting. Categories are useful and apply to
both animals and poems about them. Third, poetry reveals tendrils of
meaning about animals that other kinds of writing and thinking do
not—its inherent speculativeness, ambiguity, opacity, and openness
encourage self-questioning and sympathy, skepticism and conviction.
These qualities are surely not the only or primary ways of thinking
about animals, but they often reflect us at our most creaturely and com-
passionate. They open up new possibilities of thought, startling us with
wonder as effectively as the discovery of a new species of mammal or the
sighting of a rare bird. They can shake us out platitude and rigidity. And
they can inspire us, I hope, to treat actual animals with more respect
and justice.
The poems themselves are front and center in this book. I have given
sustained readings of many of them in part because close reading is the
work I know how to do. Close reading is the empirical evidence of any
argument about literature. Paying attention to the complexity of a poem
involves carefully articulating the poem’s multiple meanings, its contin-
gencies, and how it puts those meanings into play. As John Keats sug-
gested, reading and writing poetry requires negative capability; it allows
us to say and think several often contradictory things at once and feel
that they are all true, and that this state of mind is useful because it
helps us to see the limitations of our own thought, even as it points
us to new thoughts. Finally, the close reading of poetry mirrors the