6INTRODUCTIONCulturally, poetry occupies a shrinking proportion of the consump-
tion of the written word. With the notable exception of hip-hop, poetry
remains relatively invisible. In the realm of cultural theory, which has
had a seminal influence upon animal studies, poetry is unimportant
both because it now seems so marginal (and thus barely even a part of
culture) and because the concept of the literary, of which poetry is prob-
ably its most definitive mode, is considered a form that enables distinc-
tion and hierarchy: that it is, in a word, elitist. Though most cultural
theory is explicitly post-Marxist, it still conceives of literature as part
of a largely impersonal system of production, creating and representing
modes of power.
So too the category of poetry (which is highly malleable) has come
under suspicion in structuralist and poststructuralist thought, most
influentially in the New Historicist critique of the romantic lyric. This
critique argues that romantic desires for self-definition expressed in the
lyric mode are naïve and idealistic, actively suppressing the broadly
material forces that structure history and culture. Although there is
obviously much poetry then and now that is not in the form of the
romantic lyric, the influence of the form has been profound enough
that it is possible to think of all poetry as at best irrelevant—fiddling while
Rome burns or animals are slaughtered—and at worst guilty of being
complicit with totalizing forms of power. An important component of
the distrust of poetry in the realm of animal studies is a general suspi-
cion of subjectivity, consciousness, and conscience. Materialist critics
conceive of subjectivity as the illusion of self-autonomy, rationality,
control, and individual choice epitomized, for instance, in the work of
Wordsworth. While many contemporary poets (especially those of the
Language school) actively resist this conception of what poetry can be,
poetry in the minds of many critics and readers is still largely under-
stood to be the most subjective and spontaneous kind of representation.
Subjective responses, moreover, seem in the minds of such critics to lead
inevitably to anthropomorphism, in which any presence of the animal
is elided in favor of an anthropocentric conception of being.
In contrast to this flattened and deprecatory view of poetry, I sub-
scribe to Williams Carlos Williams’s idea that while it is difficult to get