INTRODUCTION9Poetry is a means of encountering, investigating, and representing
animals that is especially capable of mediating and altering the way we
think about them. Poems about animals do many things: they bring
animals to our attention; they give various kinds of meaning to animals;
they bring animals into the realm of human culture, even high culture;
they transform nonhuman animals into human symbols; and they allow
us to imagine modes of animal being, to attempt to cross, blur, and rei-
magine the problematic human-animal divide. Indeed, given that phi-
losophy has traditionally understood an essential part of its own purpose
as defining the human against notions of the animal and thereby solid-
ifying hierarchies, poetry can help us with new ways of imagining
human and animal relatedness. Poetry allows for experimentation and
diversity, play and openness to the new. Because language and symbol
making are at the center of historic definitions of human being, poetry’s
experimentation with language and symbols allows for a broad range
of ways of representing, thinking about, imagining, and encountering
animals.
This power of poetry is theorized in Susan Stewart’s fine book Poetry
and the Fate of the Senses. Though Stewart is not specifically concerned
with poetry about animals, she argues that poetry is centrally “an
anthropomorphic project” in the sense that it is a way of overcoming the
profoundly solipsistic nature of individual existence. Though we often
regard poetry as effete and ethereal, Stewart argues that it is in fact an
expression of fundamental physical desires: for survival, communica-
tion, and beauty. “As metered language, language that retains and proj-
ects the force of individual sense experience and yet reaches toward
intersubjective meaning, poetry sustains and transforms the threshold
between individual and social existence.” Herself an accomplished poet,
Stewart understands poetry to involve a sensual use of language, con-
necting us to our own physical existence, as well as allowing us to reach
out, to imagine and communicate with others. Drawing on Aristotle’s
definition of animals, she argues that “the sense perception of animals
is the basis of the link between their own particularity as organisms and
the life of the species through reproduction, and it is as well the ground
for their desire for an objective being, an other, by means of which such