24INTRODUCTIONforegrounds and privileges the poets themselves. I want to foreground
and privilege the field of poems about animals. I practice a mode of
criticism that respects the individual poem and animal, that can give
careful readings of the poem—an analog for close observation of the
individual animal—and that can pay attention to, and find meaning in,
notions of genre and kind. This is a flexible and even hybrid mode of
criticism that can do justice to the wide-ranging abilities of poetry to
create and reveal our engagement with animals and our conceptions of
them. Focusing on the categories through which we perceive the animal
presents category itself as a part of our interpretive process—that we
make sense of animals (read them) by categorizing them, and that these
categories have both cultural (human) and natural (biological) reali-
ties. It seems natural to allow these categories of taxonomy to infiltrate
my schema for surveying and reading poems about animals. Doing so
allows me to answer as thoughtfully as possible the fundamental ques-
tion of what a careful reading of poetry about animals can teach us
about the way we have regarded animals.
Chapter 1 is about animal allegory. I note that the earliest poetry
about animals tends to be allegorical—that is, the animal stands in for
self-evidently human concerns. However, interpretation of most animal
poems, regardless of when they were written, tends to turn them into
allegories. Indeed, any poem about an animal may be read allegorically
if a reader is insistent that all poems must be ultimately or wholly about
the human. I argue that even early allegories are concerned with, and
reflect, something of the actual animal, and that readers of animal
poems of all kinds need to resist the easy strategy of reading through
the poem to find the allegory, to see language as always solipsistic. This
chapter explores and defines the fuzzy boundaries of the animal poem
and establishes that there is a tradition (or evolution) of poetry about
animals.
Chapter 2 moves from poems that allegorize animals (or the animal)
to those that are in some way about animality, or animals as opposed to
humans. It is a paradox that we can so easily use and accept the animal
as a category (as in animal studies and animal rights) given our aware-
ness of the complexity and variety of life, and that the category obscures