INTRODUCTION7the news from poems, men (and animals) die miserably every day for
lack of what is found there: insight, meaning, and an awareness of com-
plexity and of things otherwise inexpressible. Regardless of poetry’s
effects on the broader culture, as a discourse poetry is highly flexible,
varied, productive, and complex. It can produce unique meanings and
insights that question and challenge dominant modes of thinking. In
contrast to much criticism, poetry does more to bring a reader back to
the physical world and actual animals. Poetry also provides plentiful
evidence against the notion that the present moment always possesses
both the most self-awareness of the forces that drive history and the least
ability to resist them. My survey of poetry about animals over the past
couple of centuries has revealed a history in which humans have always
had complex ideas about animals and their relations to them, ranging
from loathing to love, fear to fascination—the animal as both beast and
companion, human and nonhuman. Signal evidence of this is also found
in the earliest art of all cultures: the stunning cave paintings of Chauvet;
the complex relations between humans and animals represented by
Homer, Chaucer, a nd t he aut hor of Beowulf; and aboriginal art the
world over.
As Jacques Derrida, at least, is unembarrassed to admit, our interest
in animals, both abstract (as objects of our various kinds of discourse)
and in our daily lives, has its origin in a moment of ethical awareness
that is not purely rational, critical, or theoretical but open and reflective.
This awareness occurs in moments of recognition, such as when an indi-
vidual person looks at an individual animal and perhaps has the gaze
returned. I think poetry can speak to and amplify this kind of aware-
ness as well or better than any other mode of discourse, because it
enables a version of Keats’s negative capability that is fundamental to
exploring the similarities and differences between humans and other
animals. As Derrida says, somewhat cryptically, “Thinking concerning
the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. There you have
a thesis: it is what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of. It
is the difference between philosophical knowledge and poetic think-
ing.”^16 He means many things here: in part that philosophy, like cul-
tural studies, must attempt a definition of the animal, engage the animal