INTRODUCTION13particularly in poems of encounter. Broadening the scope of the other
to include nonhuman animals has been a part of the evolution of poetry,
as we shall see in chapter 1.
The poems Wylie analyzes are those he has collected about elephants
in southern Africa, part of a larger project on how elephants are under-
stood and reflected in different aspects of southern African culture and
in different modes of discourse. Malamud, on the other hand, examines
the work of poets whom he feels offer a sufficient degree of respect to
animals. The divergent strategies of Wylie and Malamud raise the inter-
esting question of how, if one wants to consider the specific abilities of
poetry to mediate animal being to human culture, to define the field and
select examples? In addition to Wylie and Malamud, there is also a long,
though somewhat thin, history of critical analysis of specific poets who
have written poetry about animals (such as Ted Hughes, Robinson Jef-
fers, D. H. Lawrence, and Marianne Moore), but such criticism tends to
interpret these poems in narrow and conventional (which is to say bio-
graphical and anthropocentric) ways. What I aim for is a broad analy-
sis, a sizing up of what the constraints and processes of poetry can bring
to the fraught relationship between human and animal. That is, we need
an analysis of poetry about animals from the general perspective of ani-
mal studies, which can scrutinize and document our construction of
ideas of the nonhuman animal, how these constructions have served
conceptions of the human, and how something of the actual creaturely
reality of the sentient beings that inhabit the planet might be found in
or rescued from these cultural constructions.
R
Coetzee, in The Lives of Animals, makes the strongest case yet for the
ability of poems to mediate our understanding of the animal. Although,
as I suggest earlier, the debate that Coetzee stages between philosophy and
poetry is destabilized by the complexity of its own form,^30 its central
character, Elizabeth Costello, in her second lecture offers a fragmen-
tary argument for how poetry provides a profound means of engaging