2

POEMS OF THE ANIMAL

A

s we saw in the previous chapter, even poems that invoke fable

or allegory by depicting explicit anthropocentric meanings,

that feature talking and otherwise humanized animals, can

meaningfully reflect something about actual animals and our relation

to them. That is, a poem can mediate what animals mean to us as humans

and speculate on what they are in themselves. Indeed, imagining what

the animal means as a category, while necessarily bound up with our

ideas about ourselves and our language, is a crucial part of recogniz-

ing that animals deserve our attention and moral consideration. Poetry

does this in various ways: by imagining how animals perceive the

world (what Jacob von Uexküll referred to as their “umwelt”),^1 record-

ing observations of them, documenting forms of injustice done to

them, registering their existence, and suggesting nuances of difference

and similarity between them and between them and us. Individual

poems normally reflect one of these goals, but the body of poems about

animals has a far more significant impact, which we can recognize and

assess when we see that there are broad categories of animal poems.

In the previous chapter, I examined a category of poems especially dif-

ficult to define—those poems, like those based on fables, that feature highly

anthropomorphized or allegorical animals. Examining this class of

poems helps to define what actually constitutes an animal poem—that