POEMS OF THE ANIMAL53is, a poem actually about animals. I showed that even obviously anthro-
pomorphic animal poems can engage the animal by exploring the
boundary between human and nonhuman and so should be considered
a kind of animal poem. Equally important, examining allegory reveals
that it is a strategy not just of representation but also for interpretation,
which readers can invoke as a strategy of denial and anthropocentrism.
That is, it is possible to read any poem about an animal as ultimately
being an allegory for primarily human concerns. Even such poems
as Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse,” John Clare’s “The Badger,” and Ted
Hughes’s “Hawk Roosting” are commonly read (in the realm of profes-
sional literary criticism)^2 as allegories. This is surprising because these
poems are explicitly about specific individual animals and are filled
with details of those animals. In reading these poems, I find it easy to
believe they are rooted in the actual observation of the animal by the
poet, rather than in received ideas about the animal—abstractions or
myths. That sophisticated readers can still interpret these poems as ulti-
mately about humans, in these cases as representations of class and the
poet himself, suggests how easily allegory can be invoked when an ani-
mal appears in literature.
On the one hand, reading these poems as allegories suggests the deep
reluctance of some readers to allow animals into literature, as well as a
strong predilection for reading all lyric poetry as autobiographical. Lit-
erary criticism, like human culture in general, has found interest in ani-
mals to be vaguely embarrassing, equating it with children’s literature
and childishness. On the other hand, it is simply factual that all poems
are human artifacts and so must always be about us in some way. Yet
our desire to imagine animals, to do something with and for them, is
also real, just as our own individual experience with and interest in ani-
mals is powerful and real. That animals are intrinsically interesting in
and of themselves, and as symbols for meanings we project onto them
because we need such meanings to exist palpably in the world, is at the
root of all representations of animals in poetry. All poems about ani-
mals have to negotiate these complexities, as do all readings of them.
At the crux of the problem of making sense of animal representation
in poetry is a confusion over categories. In reading poems as strictly