2022. POEMS OF THE ANIMAL
- Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of Amer-
ica, 1982), 218–19.
- The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt,
1969), 268–69.
- Ibid., 277–79. Frost here echoes the critique of human self-regard we see clearly in the
work of Jonathan Swift.
- See B. J. Sokol, “Bergson, Instinct, and Frost’s ‘The White-Tailed Hornet,’ ” Ameri-
can Literature 62, no. 1 (1990): 44–55, for an interesting reading of the poem, includ-
ing Frost’s various errors about biology, which Sokol thinks may be a deliberate part
of Frost’s strategy of “doubleness.”
- W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, The Poems, ed. Richard J.
Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997), 197–98.
- Margaret Atwood, The Animals in That Country (Boston: Little Brown, 1969), 2.
- “This country” also has zoos, rodeos, marine parks with performing sea mammals,
and the slaughter of seals on the ice flows off Newfoundland, all of which are in some
circles celebrated aspects of Canadian culture.
- Atwood has also written the poems “Song of the Fox” and “Bull Song,” about fox
hunts and bullfights.
- See the excellent article by Alison Rieke, “ ‘Plunder’ or ‘Accessibility to Experience’:
Consumer Culture and Marianne Moore’s Modernist Self-Fashioning,” Journal of
Modern Literature 27, no. 1/2 (2003): 149–70. Rieke argues that Moore’s collecting and
displaying of animal goods, including her dress and menagerie, are a complex form
of self-fashioning. “These objects came to represent her own peculiar brand of
‘commodity fetish,’ a form of consumption that seemed to accommodate her as a
naturalist and poet” (155).
- The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 40.
- See Margot Norris, Beasts of the Modern Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1985). Although she does not discuss Moore, Norris has identified
this desire as a distinctive trait of other European and American modernists. For
these writers (e.g., Charles Darwin, Max Ernst, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, and
Friedrich Nietzsche) the animal is fully in “the realm of the biological, the real: as a
plenum. It is cultural man, rather, who is engendered by an imaginary lack that gives
birth to desire, language, intersubjectivity, social life, that is, the entire Lacanian
Symbolic Order that is governed by the ‘other’ ” (3).
- Hunters frequently talk about thinking like the animal or becoming animal in the
act of hunting, much of which is self-serving and empty rhetoric. There is no ques-
tion, though, that hunting can provoke interesting thoughts about the animal and
our relationship to it.
- Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (New York: Rout-
ledge, 2008), 153.
- James Dickey, The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992 (Middletown, CT: Wes-
leyan University Press, 1992), 78–79.
- Ibid., 131–32.
