POEMS OF THE ANIMAL67made products of culture and art, as they are in this poem and in a zoo,
and so art can be “malignant / in its power over us.” For one thing, art
creates expectations of what the animals should mean and how they
should appear, which the zoo animals fail to live up to in their ordinari-
ness (as in Hughes’s “The Jaguar”). Art and animals are also both com-
modified by global economies, which produce zoos as well as markets
for art, and so art “proffers flattery in exchange for hem, / rye, flax,
horses, platinum, timber, and fur.” Moore has much more to say about
animal kinds in her other poems, as we shall see in the next chapter, but
what matters here is that she invokes the animal as abstractly figuring a
desire for what stands outside of culture and thus is (so goes the logic)
authentic and self-contained.^25
While the primary import of Moore’s poem is a critique of art and
theory that supposes both realms to be detached from the “real,” as they
claim their own relevance and autonomy, it also presents us with a
depiction of the animal as symbolizing the real (as nature or anticul-
ture). There are many poems that figure the animal as a category not
primarily in contrast to the human but as essentially mysterious and
unknowable, and thus linked to something pure. James Dickey has a
number of poems that do this to varying degrees. Most of his poems
about animals are related to hunting, an activity Dickey engaged in over
much of his life, and many of them reflect on the animal to suggest some
profundity about hunting, how it might involve an openness to the nat-
ural world—a recognition of its brutality and thus the falseness of the
civilized world.^26 As such, he is very much in the masculinist-modernist
tradition identified by Philip Armstrong as “therio-primitivism,” which
idealizes confrontation with animality as restorative because it allows
the individual the prospect of an escape from modernity. Armstrong
notes too that in tying such encounters so intently with hunting, this
tradition (most obviously represented in Ernest Hemingway) “repeats
the ideology of nineteenth-century capitalism, which defined compet-
itive individualism as the fundamental law of both human and non-
human nature.”^27
Dickey’s poem “The Heaven of Animals” idealizes the animal as
hunter, defined by pure instinct but placed “in heaven” in order to