INTRODUCTION25our own status as animals. Beyond the scientific uses of the category
of the animal, why do we need or imagine it? While Giorgio Agamben
and Jacques Derrida make the case that the category exists to separate
humanity and philosophy from the natural world, this is only one rea-
son among many. Poems imagine, imply, and figure the category of the
animal in many different ways with different effects and meanings.
Writing a poem that figures the category of the animal can have the
effect of distancing humanity from the community of nonhuman ani-
mals, to see that community as other and strange. Or the poem can
identify the community as a group deserving of attention and care.
Or it can idealize or de-idealize animals or humans. Animals as a group
can be figured concretely or abstractly, through examples of many of
them, or by simply speaking directly about “the animals” (the title of a
surprising number of poems).
Chapter 3 examines poems that attempt to define specific animal spe-
cies, which I find to be the most numerous class. This is not surprising,
since we so commonly identify other animals as types or kinds, rather
than as individuals. One definition of the animal may well be those crea-
tures we recognize as belonging to or constituting a type rather than a
collection of individuals. Type produces its own hermeneutics; like the
notion of genre in literature, kind in the biological realm is always an
abstraction from actual (individual) examples. The concept of species
does not simply invite definition but requires it. Just so, biologists have
long worked at defining the crucial features of biological kinds and
have attempted to order all of creation based on resemblance and differ-
ence. Poetry’s definitions are frequently informed by science but do vastly
different work. I examine this class of poetry critically, making sense of
both the pleasures of species identification and its limitations.
In chapter 4 I read those poems that attempt to approach, recognize,
and speak to and for individual animals. These are in a sense the most
romantic of the animal poems and have been idealized by some critics
as the most morally serious, while decried by others as suffering from
anthropomorphic delusion. I explore what is at stake in approaching
the individual animal. What can a poem do to imagine the boundary
between a human and a single other creature? Why is this desire—to