INTRODUCTION21identity. There are no doubt interesting things to say about these cate-
gories as they apply to the field of poems about animals. American,
Australian, Canadian, English, and Japanese poems about animals,
examined as distinct groups, would presumably reflect some cultural
differences in attitudes toward animals and something of the differences
of native species themselves. Grouping poems by author reveals the par-
ticular experiences, practices, and ethics of the author in relation to
animals but inevitably turns the focus on authorial intentions or hab-
its and does not allow us to see the full range of work that poetry about
animals can do, or more interestingly, the variety of ways that animals
present themselves to human imagination and perception. These two
categories (in addition to time period) are so dominant in how literary
scholarship organizes and understands poetry that we can barely imag-
ine other categories. I want to explore categories that arise out of the
field of writing about animals, and that address how animals present
themselves to poetry and what kind of good, or meaning, poetry makes
of animals: how, as Henry David Thoreau put it in Wal d e n, animals
are “made to carry some portion of our thoughts” and how they “make
a world.”^40
Here, then, are some other modes of categorizing animal poems. An
appealing mode of categorization, one invoked by both Coetzee and
Malamud and central to animal studies in general, is the degree to
which a literary animal is allowed to remain itself, an animal, as opposed
to becoming a symbol or allegory for something else. At one extreme,
you have the animal as allegory or pure symbol—think of Thomas
Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat” or Percy Bysshe Shelley’s
“To a Skylark.” In the former poem, the actual cat (and its actual death)
are ironically and explicitly made to stand for the vanity of women and
its dangers. In Shelley’s poem, the bird is disembodied, and the idea of
its music becomes an emblem for the poet’s own Platonic aspirations.
The individual animals (the favorite cat, a skylark) are of little apparent
concern to the poet, the poem, or the implied reader (though the actual
reader may be shocked by the cruelty of Gray’s poem). At the other end
of this spectrum we find something like Coetzee’s ideal poem—a poem
that somehow registers the reality of the individual animal in and of