Poetry and Animals

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POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE113

of the idea that animals can embody “bounty” and appetite, as well as
signaling the dubious progress of our symbolism, since the cuckoo,
lamb, and steer of the earlier poem have been replaced by the appar-
ently grotesque sea elephant, and the song of the cuckoo replaced by
“Blouaugh!”
The most prolific and interesting modern animal poet is surely Ted
Hughes. To some degree, he is in the modernist tradition that Mar-
got  Norris and Philip Armstrong identify as primitivist, in which an
engagement with the animal represents an escape from the tempo-
rary and false realm of culture. However, he is not so much interested
in “animality in general,” as Armstrong suggests,^49 as in the nature of
many different species. His animal poems consistently present animals
through the lens of species, type, and archetype. It matters that he was
a committed observer of animals, lived with them on farms, and sought
them out in the wild. He is certainly using animals as a way of defin-
ing his poetic career and identifying essences of the natural world and
human being, but there can be no question that he was also interested
in animals themselves. (These need not be contradictory impulses,
of course.) Of his animal poems, there are about a hundred in the Col-
lected Poems whose titles are common names for species or genera,
including twenty in the collection A Primer of Birds, and not including
the ninety or so that he wrote in Crow (which run the gamut from fable,
myth, and mask to observation). Poems like “Black-Back Gull,” “The
Black Rhino,” “A Hare,” “Jaguar,” “Pike,” and “Tern” aim to accomplish
what Muldoon suggests all animal poems do, attempting to get at some
essence of a kind of animal, to distill some definitive not-necessarily-
human meaning.^50 Where other bird/animal watchers put checks
beside their lists of species seen and identified, Hughes wrote poems for
them. To me his animal poems are evidence of the general phenome-
non I have been exploring—poems that reveal “creatures... acting out
their creature natures,” as Daniel Hoffman has put it.^51 They acknowl-
edge the significance of the animal to Hughes and are a record of his
having witnessed, identified, and made sense of the distinctness of
their being as abstracted types. These animals have made a mark on

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