- POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE205
Phillips argues that the field guide offers a practical example of the potential for lit-
erary texts to engage readers with the natural world, and he faults literary texts for
failing to be “cautionary” in the way that Peterson is in explaining to readers the
practical problems of representing and identifying species characteristics. My claim
is that lyric obscurity is inherently cautionary.
- David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003).
- Tiffany, Infidel Poetics, 180.
- William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (Oxford: Oxford Universit y Press,
1970), 134.
- Of course, wild animals have been captured, kept, and exhibited for centuries, and it
would have been possible to view an actual tiger in London during Blake’s day.
- Blake, Songs of Innocence, 148.
- Thomas Bewick’s description makes clear that the tiger’s most notorious quality is
that it preys on human flesh. His long account of the tiger begins by describing it
as “the most rapacious and destructive of all carnivorous animals. Fierce without
provocation, and cruel without necessity, its thirst for blood is insatiable: Though
glutted with slaughter, it continues its carnage, nor ever gives up so long as a single
object remains in its sight: Flocks and herds fall indiscriminate victims to its fury:
It fears neither the sight nor the opposition of man, whom it frequently makes its
prey; and it is even said to prefer human flesh to that of any other animal.” Bewick, A
General History of Quadrupeds, ed. Yann Martel (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009), 206.
- Billy Collins, introduction to Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About
Birds, ed. Billy Collins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 3.
- Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013) gives remarkable evidence of this. White’s letters show that he is fascinated by
ornithology and views studying bird behavior, flight, and song as essential parts of
being a naturalist.
- For a good overview of the history of birds and birdsong in poetry and English
romanticism’s special interest in birdsong, see Frank Doggett, “Romanticism’s Sing-
ing Bird,” Studies in English Literature 14, no. 4 (1974): 547–61.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1985), 99–101.
- See Alice A. Kuzniar, Melancholia’s Dog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006), which traces some of the links between the representation of animals, melan-
cholia, and muteness.
- See David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing: A Journey Into the Mystery of Bird Song (New
York: Basic Books, 2005), 130. It is curious that nightingale song is often represented
as “ jugging.” This is because it often contains a few distinct unmusical sounds that
can be represented by the sound of “jug jug” (as Coleridge does in his poem), revealing
something of how reductive our attempt to identify species’ songs can be. Rothenberg
also reports that nightingales, like many songbirds, learn their songs and perform
