2124. THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY- In “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth refers to his
own youth as a period characterized by “glad animal movement.” - Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 214.
- Wordsworth wrote a pair of elegiac poems for a friend’s dog, “Fidelity” and “Tribute:
To the Memory of the Same Dog,” that explicitly note the powerful and surprising
nature of grief for a dog. Lord Byron also wrote a surprisingly sincere poem in mem-
ory of his dog. - Mark Doty’s memoir Dog Years (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008) is an extraordi-
nary account of his grief over the death of several of his companion dogs, specifically
in the context of the death of his lover. Doty also has several great elegies on his dogs. - W. S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2009), 53.
5. OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRID - Vanessa Guignery, “Introduction: Hybridity, Why It Still Matters,” Hybridity: Forms
and Figures in Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Vanessa Guignery, Catherine Pesso-
Miquel, and Francois Specq (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 1–9. - Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas, 1982); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location
of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004). - The only example I can find in literary criticism about human-animal hybridity is
on Kafka’s animal stories. See Marc Lucht and Donna Yarri, eds., Kafka’s Creatures:
Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings (Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2010). - There are many reasons animals might attempt to mate across species boundaries. It
can result from the power of the sex drive, the genetic similarity of many species, and
human interference. - Siv Kristoffersen, “Half Beast—Half Man: Hybrid Figures in Animal Art,” Worl d
Archaeology 42, no. 2 (2001): 261–72; Michel Lorblanchet, “From Man to Animal and
Sign in Paleolithic Art,” Animals Into Art, ed. Howard Morphy (London: Unwin
Hyman, 1989), 109–43. - Mark Wallace, “Against Unity,” The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays Into Contempo-
rary Poetics, ed. Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher (Akron, OH: University of Akron
Press, 2011), 121. See also David St. John and Cole Swenson, eds., American Hybrid: A
Norton Anthology of New Poetry (New York: Norton, 2009). - Marianne Moore, The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (New York: Macmillan,
1967), 262. - Ibid., 20–25.
- The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Grace Schulman (New York: Penguin, 2003),
122–24. - This hybridity is suggested too by the poem’s title, which comes from Philip Mel-
anchthon, a colleague of Martin Luther, who changed his name from Schwarzerd,