20INTRODUCTIONWe create abstractions about animals, allowing us to ignore their indi-
viduality and treat them as “resources” or “pests” or as irrelevant. The
subjection of various groups of humans by others is almost always
enabled by the ability to categorize those other humans as less than
human, as a kind of animal. Racism and sexism are our clearest and
most destructive examples of how we subordinate awareness of individ-
ual worth to generalized and seemingly biological notions of type. Coe-
tzee argues that in terms of engaging with animals, thinking about
them through poetry is better than philosophy precisely because the
former tends to engage the individual animal and thus brings us to a
moral awareness of the individual rather than the category. “Every living
creature fights for its own, individual life, refuses, by fighting, to accede
to the idea that the salmon or the gnat is of a lower order of importance
than the idea of the salmon or the idea of the gnat.... Animals are not
believers in ecology.”^39
And yet category seems impossible to eliminate, as even Coetzee
refers to kinds of animal poetry. And in my attempt to survey animal
poetry, I am inevitably confronted not only by the problem of organiza-
tion but also by the development of an idea of the ideal animal poem,
which is itself a category. Approaching poems about animals is like
approaching animals themselves in that we can only come to some idea
of kinds or categories through individual examples, but we inevitably
assess and understand the individual by contrasting it to gradually evolv-
ing notions of type. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals suggests the existence of
poles along which we might classify and evaluate poetry about animals.
Costello valorizes poetry that represents encounters with individual
animals, as opposed to abstracting them into kinds. She also valorizes
poems that dwell on the physical being of animals, rather than imagin-
ing and portraying their mental life or consciousness. Both of these
parameters of categorization arise from her ethical stance toward the
lives of animals and her critique of the human valorization of reason
and consciousness. However, there are many other possible categories,
which I would like to survey briefly.
For my purposes, the least useful but most common criteria for cat-
egorizing poetry are the traditional notions of national and authorial