2104. THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY
animals. However, it seems simply factual that many animals do actually possess
abilities once thought to be only human, and that imagination plays a vital role in
uncovering these similarities.
- David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003).
- Frederick Garber, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Encounter (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1971), 39, 29.
- Ibid., 63.
- William Wordsworth: The Poems, vol. 1, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1977), 533.
- Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights, 146.
- Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. R. W. Franklin
(Cambridge: Belknap, 2005), 163.
- Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America,
1982), 219.
- Jimmie Killingsworth has argued for the importance of seeing the ways Whitman
aligned himself with animals. He notes too that Whitman’s attempts to articulate
animal being move from the relative inarticulateness and silences of “Song of
Myself ” (the “ya-honks” and “yawps”) to full ventriloquism in “Out of the Cradle.”
Killingsworth, “As If the Beasts Spoke: The Animal/Animist/Animated Walt Whit-
man,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 28, no. 1–2 (2010): 19–35.
- Whitman, Poetry and Prose, 388–91.
- Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London: Palgrave MacMil-
lan, 2002), 150.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Skylark,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York: Norton,
1977), 228.
- That Hardy was interested in the fate of individual animals is reflected too in such
poems as “The Blinded Bird” and “The Caged Goldfinch.” See John Hughes, “Hardy
and the Life of Birds,” Thomas Hardy Journal 14, no. 3 (1998): 68–77.
- The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt,
1979), 1.
- Ibid., 101.
- Ibid., 338.
- “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” William Wordsworth: The
Poems, vol. 1, ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 360.
- The Poetry of Robert Frost, 229.
- Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Gir-
oux, 1983), 169–73.
- Robinson Jeffers, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt (Redwood
City: Stanford University Press, 2002), 165–66.
- Since we are now in the Anthropocene age, in which our activities have profoundly
altered the entire globe and thus every animal habitat, one could argue, pace Bill
McKibben, that there is now no such thing as a wild animal.
