INTRODUCTION17“neither the being of the universe nor the being of God... [but rather]
the being of one tendency in human thought.” And in what many
readers take to be the central point of her argument about our ability
to know the lives of animals, she says: “To thinking, cogitation, I oppose
fullness, embodiedness, the sensation of being—not a consciousness of
yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but
on the contrary the sensation—a heavily affective sensation—of being a
body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive in the
world.”^35 For Coetzee and Costello, this is the large common ground
between humans and other sentient creatures—not the elimination of
mental existence but a conception of awareness as largely occupied by
the physical sensation of existence, rather than the more abstract and
disembodied notions of reason and, perhaps, self-consciousness (though
one could argue that self-consciousness also involves a keen awareness
of one’s body). Because we are ourselves embodied animals, imagining
this form of sentience is within the reach of our sympathetic imagina-
tion. It is the ability of Hughes’s poetry to reflect and produce an aware-
ness of creaturely sensation that Costello celebrates in her account of
his poetry.
For Costello, poetry about animals can speak beyond the constraints
of reason, of what we can absolutely know. It is a spur to the imagina-
tion, and implicitly also to sympathy. But of course not all poems that
represent animals do this. As Costello notes, there are kinds of animal
poetry. Indeed, in one of the most idealistic moments of her argument
she states that a poem that is serious about approaching and imagining
the actual animal will inevitably resist notions of kind or species: “It
has to be that way. Jaguars in general, the subspecies jaguar, the idea of
a jaguar, will fail to move [the poet] because we cannot experience
abstractions.”^36 The jaguar experiences only its own existence; it can’t
know its own jaguarness, just as the poet can only see actual individ-
ual jaguars, or other animals, not the abstraction that aims to define or
describe the essence of the species, genus, family, and so on. We too know
our own humanness through self-knowledge and knowledge of other
individuals, though we frequently also try to define something essen-
tial about our species or its seeming subsets, such as those of gender,