POEMS OF THE ANIMAL65The poetry of Marianne Moore similarly presents the animal as
a complex signifier. She is one of the most important poets of the
animal—of animals as types (species) and as a general category. She wrote
dozens of extraordinary poems on animals and arguably assumed
the animal as part of her identity as a modern poet.^23 Unlike many con-
temporary poets who write frequently about animals (such as Ted
Hughes, Pattiann Rogers, and Richard Wilbur), her knowledge of animals
did not come primarily through first-hand observation and encounter
so much as from visits to museums and zoos and from reading books
and magazines. This is highlighted in her poetry through her frequent
use of quotations and notes and implied by her emphasis on exotic ani-
mals. Because her knowledge of animals often came through scientific
books and magazines, which frame knowledge of animals abstractly,
her poetry of animals is also frequently about animal kinds: the ani-
mals she encountered were already specimens, stuffed, mounted, and
made inert through various modes of representation. Her poems tend
toward abstraction even as they present specific and dazzling details.
Poems such as “The Monkeys,” “The Fish,” “The Buffalo,” and “Snakes,
Mongooses, Snake Charmers, and the Like” point to larger categories
of the animal and symbolic/allegorical meanings we attach to those
categories.
As in many other poems by Moore and other modernists, the title
of “The Monkeys” serves as the first words of the poem rather than
announcing its actual subject. Ironically, though, the poem’s odd alle-
gorical meaning reinstates the monkeys as the real subject: art critics.
In four syllabic stanzas, the poem recounts an apparently real visit to a
zoo, crisply characterizing some of its more appealing fauna, though
in explicitly subjective terms.
THE MONKEYS
winked too much and were afraid of snakes. The zebras,
supreme in
their abnormality; the elephants with their fog-colored skin
and strictly practical appendages