Animal Poems Research Articles

Greek Tragedy and Cathartic Violence in Leconte de Lisle’s Animal Poems

Abstract This article proposes a new understanding of Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle’s famous animal poems. While recent studies have identified an innovative non-anthropocentric perspective in the texts – vivid snapshots of brute existence, without deeper meaning – we find that these animals function in a more complex manner. Locating them throughout his poetry, beyond the ‘portraits’ most readers are familiar with, we find that they are highly figurative participants in his extensive depictions of human history, lending a more visceral quality to this series of tragedies – recurring scenes that, with their sacrificial violence and devoured victims, indeed suggest an unexpected connection with this literary genre, in its earliest form. Equally unexpected, this connection appears most tenable not in those texts where humans share the stage (as in his adaptation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia), but where they are absent. Eliminating the figurative descriptions and impassioned dialogue of the historical and dramatic poems to focus on actual acts of predation, the poet allows the reader to experience these explosions of ‘purely animal’ violence as cathartic, tragic ritual.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Dark Ecology

Rainer Maria Rilke’s significance for a modern eco-poetics has attracted ever-increasing interest over the past two decades, with sophisticated ontological, phenomenological, and even ethological approaches to his animal poems, as well as such late poetic figures as ‘das Offene’ in Duineser Elegien (1923). However, many of these readings have worked from the persistent premise of a mystical — Romantically inflected or even monistic — conception of nature, grounded in an idealized (re-)union of subject and object and inner and outer spaces. By contrast, this article suggests that we can learn far more from the points of mismatch, irreconcilability, and alienation to be found in the ‘thing poetics’ of Rilke’s so-called ‘middle’ period (1902–1910). Arguing in dialogue with Timothy Morton’s call for a ‘dark ecology’ and working from Rilke’s own theoretical reflections in his Worpswede monograph (1903), I trace out the convoluted entwinements of subject and object, mind and matter, and nature and artifice across both parts of Neue Gedichte (1907 and 1908), and in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). Morton calls for a form of ecological thought that might learn to ‘love’ the ‘non-identical’: in other words, properly and truly to recognize the ‘irreducible otherness’ within our myriad environments. My essay considers what that theoretical love might look like in the poetic practice of one of the great German-language modernists. 1 1 I would like to thank Rüdiger Görner, Christa Jansohn, and Friedhelm Marx for their comments on an earlier version of this essay.

Poetics of Humility: Animal Ethics in Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

Abstract Despite the “literary turn” in moral philosophy, which was precipitated by the confluence of post-structural, postmodern currents in literature and a renewed interest in Aristotle’s virtue ethics in philosophy, the field of animal ethics has largely refrained from engaging with literature. Although the oeuvres of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell include numerous poems that feature animals, they remain relatively inconspicuous in animal ethics discourse, in part because their poems have often been assumed to use animals as figurations, rather than being about animals. This article rereads Bishop’s and Lowell’s animal poems through the lens of animal ethics. Through a close analysis of Bishop’s and Lowell’s animal poems ranging from “The Moose” and “The Swan” to “Trouvée” and “Turtle,” this essay examines how Bishop’s and Lowell’s animal poems speak to and about those animals with an awareness of, and deference to, their unknowability.

The Face of the Other: Reading a Selection of Animal Poems by D.H. Lawrence

In the present paper I would like to show that the animal, as represented in D.H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers, has often a face. Sometimes it is the “sensitive, long, pure-bred face” of a Kangaroo or the “pale-face” of a red wolf that arrests the attention of a reader who, though recognizing otherness and difference in the animal, realizes that man is “not the measure of creation.” But nowhere does the portrayal of the animal face touch the reader as much as it does in the poem “Mountain Lion” where the face of the Other reveals the infinite cruelty perpetrated on animals by humans, and brings up a series of questions (often disturbingly ethical) about man’s responsibility towards the animal world.

The Zoopoetics of Les Murray

Today, the Western world is extensively centred around human language and the natural sciences. The transformative powers of poetry, such as they can bring forth the presence of nonhuman animals, have thus been marginalized in several respects. This article investigates how the animal poems of Presence, a poetic sequence in the poetry collection Translations from the Natural World by the Australian poet Les Murray, re-sensitizes the reader to the expressive bodies of nonhuman animals and establishes the notion of a more-than-human world. By introducing Aaron M. Moe’s concept of zoopoetics, a theory and practice that links the nonhuman animal as a maker, subject and individual to the art of writing and reading poetry, Murray’s animal poems can be understood as deeply attentive texts that use human language to explore how nonhuman bodies and minds exist outside of anthropocentric binaries, and shape not only our physical realities, but also our imagination.

Six Poems

Astrid Cabral is a leading Brazilian poet and environmentalist who grew up in Manaus, on the Amazon River. She is the translator of Thoreau’s Walden into Portuguese. Recent collections of her poetry include The Waiting Room, Gazing Through Water, Word in the Spotlight, Intimate Soot, and Cage (second expanded edition). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Runes, Sirena, Amazonian Literary Review, Bitter Oleander, Catamaran, Cincinnati Review, Confrontation, Dirty Goat, Evansville Review, Per Contra, Poetry East, Poets at Work, and Osiris. Her book Cage, Amazonian animal poems translated by Alexis Levitin, appeared from Host Publications in July, 2008.

Ten Poems from Spotlight on the Word

Astrid Cabral is a leading poet and environmentalist from the Amazonian region of Brazil. She is the translator of Thoreau’s Walden into Portuguese. Recent collections of her poetry include The Anteroom, Gazing Through Water, Word in the Spotlight, Intimate Soot, and Cage (second expanded edition). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Runes, Sirena, Amazonian Literary Review, Bitter Oleander, Catamaran, Cincinnati Review, Confrontation, Dirty Goat, Evansville Review, Per Contra, Poetry East, Poets at Work, and Osiris. Her book Cage, Amazonian animal poems translated by Alexis Levitin, appeared from Host Publications in July 2008.

Theme of Nemesis in British Animal Poems

Theme of Nemesis in British Animal Poems

Jay Geller. Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ix + 404 pp.

Reviewed by: Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews by Jay Geller Ulrike Schneider Jay Geller. Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ix + 404 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000357 Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, written in 1912 and first published in 1915 in René Schickele's journal Weiße Blätter, was not the only narrative that dealt with animal figures as protagonists. Readers of Kafka's work are familiar with Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk; Jackals and Arabs; and the character Red Peter from A Report to an Academy. In addition to Kafka there were other German Jewish writers—from Heinrich Heine in the nineteenth century to the screenwriter and author Curt Siodmak, who escaped to the United States in 1933—who depicted anthropomorphized animals. Jay Geller interrogates the intentions of these representations in Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. Focusing on the period from 1750 until the 1940s, Geller avoids a simplification of political and ideological questions. He is interested in the "development of such animal figures by Jewish-identified, pre-eminently Germanophone writers during the Era of the Jewish Question in order to inquire … about what may be going on when they are telling animal tales and composing animal poems" (5). On the one hand, he discusses different representations of animal figures and their humanization as a result of social and political developments. On the other hand, he points out the history of anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the German states from the Middle Ages and the association of Jews with animals and animality in Christian and later racist writings. His work discusses well-known and widely explored authors such as Heine and Kafka; specific studies by Sigmund Freud, including The Rat Man and The Wolf Man; prose texts by Gertrud Kolmar, Felix Salten, and Max Brod; and Maus by Art Spiegelman. However, the emphasis is on the mentioned "major" German Jewish authors. Geller's book is composed of an introduction, eight chapters, and an afterword. His notes function partly as a commentary elucidating the historical and social backgrounds of the different periods. Most of these chapters derive from lectures, as becomes noticeable with some repetitions in the analysis of Freud and Heine. The following detailed description of the first chapter should clarify the whole structure of the book. The chapter "'O Beastly Jews': A Brief History of an (Un) Natural History" gives an overview of the identification of Jews with images of nonhuman creatures and how the image of "the Jew" and "the Jew-Animal" had developed over the centuries. The depiction of Christian—and later European, especially German—imagination of Jews and pigs, wolves, dogs, apes, or goats demonstrates the formation of stereotypes, starting with the Christian polemical bestiaries of the Middle Ages. Geller incorporates illustrations that he uses to demonstrate the broad impact of antisemitism in "humorous" postcards, journals, or pamphlets since the nineteenth century. Among these images is the 1899 Museé des Horreurs from France, which caricatured Alfred Dreyfus and the Jews and non-Jews who [End Page 252] supported him. By analyzing the illustrations, Geller emphasizes that it is not only the question "of analogizing or identifying Jews with animals per se, but rather with animals that threaten the human/animal hierarchical opposition that helped sustain the social order" (44). Geller offers a complementary and extended perspective on sources about medieval Jewry. In his discussion of human-animal hybrids, the author compares several sources and confronts Christian practices with Jewish traditions where animals—in contrast to the Christian interpretation—"did not specifically represent ethnic or other such groups" (45). Most of the chapters (2 until 7) include analyses of prose texts, poems, and tales by Heine and Kafka. Geller ties his selected corpus together by pointing out processes of publication, discourses of social and political developments, discussions about Jewish identity, and attributions by the non-Jewish majority. Geller uses the example of Heine's poems, as well as some of his Travel Pictures that sketched out animal figures, to critically demonstrate both the project of Emancipation and inner-Jewish discussions on the one hand, and German scholars' defamation of Jewish writers and...

Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews by Jay Geller

Reviewed by: Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews by Jay Geller Ulrike Schneider Jay Geller. Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ix + 404 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419000357 Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, written in 1912 and first published in 1915 in René Schickele's journal Weiße Blätter, was not the only narrative that dealt with animal figures as protagonists. Readers of Kafka's work are familiar with Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk; Jackals and Arabs; and the character Red Peter from A Report to an Academy. In addition to Kafka there were other German Jewish writers—from Heinrich Heine in the nineteenth century to the screenwriter and author Curt Siodmak, who escaped to the United States in 1933—who depicted anthropomorphized animals. Jay Geller interrogates the intentions of these representations in Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. Focusing on the period from 1750 until the 1940s, Geller avoids a simplification of political and ideological questions. He is interested in the "development of such animal figures by Jewish-identified, pre-eminently Germanophone writers during the Era of the Jewish Question in order to inquire … about what may be going on when they are telling animal tales and composing animal poems" (5). On the one hand, he discusses different representations of animal figures and their humanization as a result of social and political developments. On the other hand, he points out the history of anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the German states from the Middle Ages and the association of Jews with animals and animality in Christian and later racist writings. His work discusses well-known and widely explored authors such as Heine and Kafka; specific studies by Sigmund Freud, including The Rat Man and The Wolf Man; prose texts by Gertrud Kolmar, Felix Salten, and Max Brod; and Maus by Art Spiegelman. However, the emphasis is on the mentioned "major" German Jewish authors. Geller's book is composed of an introduction, eight chapters, and an afterword. His notes function partly as a commentary elucidating the historical and social backgrounds of the different periods. Most of these chapters derive from lectures, as becomes noticeable with some repetitions in the analysis of Freud and Heine. The following detailed description of the first chapter should clarify the whole structure of the book. The chapter "'O Beastly Jews': A Brief History of an (Un) Natural History" gives an overview of the identification of Jews with images of nonhuman creatures and how the image of "the Jew" and "the Jew-Animal" had developed over the centuries. The depiction of Christian—and later European, especially German—imagination of Jews and pigs, wolves, dogs, apes, or goats demonstrates the formation of stereotypes, starting with the Christian polemical bestiaries of the Middle Ages. Geller incorporates illustrations that he uses to demonstrate the broad impact of antisemitism in "humorous" postcards, journals, or pamphlets since the nineteenth century. Among these images is the 1899 Museé des Horreurs from France, which caricatured Alfred Dreyfus and the Jews and non-Jews who [End Page 252] supported him. By analyzing the illustrations, Geller emphasizes that it is not only the question "of analogizing or identifying Jews with animals per se, but rather with animals that threaten the human/animal hierarchical opposition that helped sustain the social order" (44). Geller offers a complementary and extended perspective on sources about medieval Jewry. In his discussion of human-animal hybrids, the author compares several sources and confronts Christian practices with Jewish traditions where animals—in contrast to the Christian interpretation—"did not specifically represent ethnic or other such groups" (45). Most of the chapters (2 until 7) include analyses of prose texts, poems, and tales by Heine and Kafka. Geller ties his selected corpus together by pointing out processes of publication, discourses of social and political developments, discussions about Jewish identity, and attributions by the non-Jewish majority. Geller uses the example of Heine's poems, as well as some of his Travel Pictures that sketched out animal figures, to critically demonstrate both the project of Emancipation and inner-Jewish discussions on the one hand, and German scholars' defamation of Jewish writers and...

Boom! Bellow! Bleat!: Animal Poems for Two or More Voices by Georgia Heard

Boom! Bellow! Bleat!: Animal Poems for Two or More Voices by Georgia Heard

The feral brain: Hemingway and Ted Hughes

Most great animal poems—by Rilke, Lawrence, Jeffers, Roethke, and Bishop—approach their subject from the author’s point of view. They try to identify with and think like, penetrate and describe the...

A Sociopolitical Ecofeminist Reading of Selected Animal Poems by Elizabeth Bishop

This article examines the sociopolitical vision of some of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems from an ecofeminist critical perspective. Bishop, a twentieth-century American poet, uses animals and natural elements to manifest her attachment to nature (and women by implication), thus reflecting an oppressed feminist voice through the theme of abused, weak nature. By relating Bishop’s poems to W. B. Yeats’s poem Leda and the Swan, we foreground an ecofeminist relation between the Greek myth Yeats employed and Bishop’s poems. Our contribution lies in the multilayered pattern of ecofeminist defense this article traces in poems like Giant Snail, Giant Toad, Strayed Crab, The Armadillo, Sandpiper, The Moose and Trouvée. The conclusion emphasizes the attempts Bishop shoulders through her animal poetry to renew the old man-nature relation of balance and justice and simultaneously to elevate woman/nature. Bishop's poetry, it is argued, exceeds the personal or subjective and thus contains socio-political, anti-patriarchal thrusts explored in this article through an ecofeminist lens.

The “Fellowship of Sense”: Anna Letitia Barbauld and Interspecies Community

The “Fellowship of Sense”: Anna Letitia Barbauld and Interspecies Community Inhye Ha (bio) Through concerted scholarly efforts since the 1990s, anna Letitia Barbauld’s poetry has regained its richly deserved canonical status after what William McCarthy has termed “more than a century of near-total obliteration.”1 McCarthy and Olivia Murphy’s coedited collection of critical essays about Barbauld marks a watershed in Barbauld scholarship and simultaneously illustrates the enduring relevance of her poems in the context of the twenty-first century. Due primarily to the poet’s multifarious engagements in contemporary dissenter politics, science, moral and aesthetic philosophy, literary taste, and education in late-eighteenth-century Britain, her poems display a wide range of topics and voices. Among those, Barbauld’s concerns with nonhuman species are prominent and take on increasing exigency, especially when read in the context of recent posthumanist scholarship advocating environmental ethics.2 Scholarly responses to Barbauld’s treatment of the nonhuman have varied [End Page 453] widely. Sylvia Bowerbank, Darren Howard, and Michelle Levy have construed the animal presence within Barbauld’s poems and prose works as an apt vehicle to enlighten and educate children.3 Similarly, Felicity James and Ian Inkster highlight Barbauld’s symbolic significance as a Unitarian educator who deftly employed the trope of personification primarily for a pedagogical purpose.4 With a focus on the Scientific Revolution, Julia Saunders and Mary Ellen Bellanca place Barbauld’s animal poems within eighteenth-century women’s engagement in science, moral philosophy, and theorization of feelings.5 Indeed, the emotions of pity, sympathy, and benevolence Barbauld expresses in the face of vulnerable, helpless creatures are connected to crucial cultural discourses of sentiment that had been prominent in Britain since the mid-eighteenth century. Building on such historicist readings of Barbauld’s treatment of nonhuman species, Laura Mandell and Alice G. Den Otter respectively investigate the intersection of the political and the literary: the former persuasively articulates the political dimension of Barbauld’s use of personification, a literary device designed to “stimulate political activism” by contesting the status quo.6 Den Otter, in a similar vein, connects Barbauld’s representation of the caterpillar to contemporary British sympathy with the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte and the concomitant efforts at pest control in late eighteenth-century Britain.7 Under the banner of disparate theoretical practices, these scholars share the common assumption that nonhuman species play a predominantly representational role in Barbauld’s animal poems, providing Barbauld with a poetic subject instrumental for her references to supposedly broad and significant human realms of social and ethical concern. For example, the caterpillar—probably the most often-discussed poetic object in Barbauld’s animal poems—has long been read as a metonym for suffering political subjects in the 1790s, including dissenters, women, slaves, and Corsicans. [End Page 454] This essay, however, argues that Barbauld’s animal poems elucidate an eighteenth-century posthumanist formulation of self and community, one that arises from the poet’s ability to register the beauty and vitality manifested in nonhuman species.8 The birds, insects, flowers, and trees that populate Barbauld’s poetry and prose constitute an integral part of both her ethical and aesthetic concerns.9 Focusing on encounters between human observers and nonhuman creatures in poems like “The Caterpillar” (1816) and “The Mouse’s Petition” (1773), I assert that these poetic meeting points epitomize a two-way street where a nonhuman tames a human subjectivity in profoundly ethical ways.10 Conversely, Barbauld also reveals how the ethical human subject—one who discerns nonhuman agency and vitality—can help to create an affective community in which species differences are properly addressed and respected. The essay begins by exploring how the persona of Barbauld’s poem “The Caterpillar” moves progressively from empirical observation to aesthetic experience as a means of theorizing ethical action.11 I argue that Barbauld distinguishes herself from previous eighteenth-century theorists of aesthetics—Joseph Addison, Francis [End Page 455] Hutcheson, Joseph Priestley, and Edmund Burke—through her understanding that colors are central to the experience of beauty: she ultimately revises traditional ideas of the beautiful, both by equating colors with the vitality of the nonhuman and by explicitly connecting the perception of...

Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women’s Environmental Writing, 1781–1924The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics

Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women’s Environmental Writing, 1781–1924The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics

Animal Poetry and Empathy

This article discusses how our ideas of empathy are influenced by the dichotomy of mind versus body, also known as Cartesian dualism. Within the aesthetic field, this dichotomy is seen when researchers define narrative empathy as imaginatively reconstructing the fictional character’s thoughts and feelings. Conversely, the empathy aroused by a non-narrative work of art is seen as an unconscious bodily mirroring of movements, postures or moods. Thinking dualistically does not only have consequences for what we consider human nature; it also affects our view on animals. To show the untenability of dualistic thinking, this article focuses on the animal poetry genre. Using the ideas of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I analyze two animal poems: “Inventing a Horse” by Meghan O’Rourke and “Spermaceti” by Les Murray. The analysis of these two poems suggests that the presiding ideas about aesthetic empathy and empathy in general need re-evaluation.

Hardy’s Deep Discordance

ABSTRACTWhile Thomas Hardy is acknowledged as a major author of the Victorian period, his poetry is less critically regarded than his novels, and of his poetic subjects, few have been given less attention than animals. Despite this, Hardy’s animal poetry is among his best known and most frequently anthologised, and forms an important part of his poetic corpus. This essay argues that Hardy’s animal poetics require critical attention in part because they have yet to receive it and, in addition, because Hardy’s animal poetics gently force the reader to reckon with discursive traditions that privilege humanity over animality to the detriment of both. Through an analysis of five animal poems this essay suggests that both the image of “good little Thomas Hardy”, as James famously called him, and the more typical view of Hardy as a misanthropic pessimist miss Hardy’s rhetorical use of “deep discordancy” to promote an emergent post-Darwinian posthumanism.

Nature’s Witness: Allegory and Sensation in Leconte de Lisle’s Animal Poems

This article offers the first ecocritical approach to Leconte de Lisle’s body of animal poems in the Poèmes babares and the Poèmes tragiques. I argue for a reassessment of this Parnassian poet that acknowledges the novelty and biocentrism of his animal poems. These contribute to modern ‘wilderness’ mythology, but also avoid its pitfalls (the romanticization of the human encounter with wilderness) by radically erasing any human witness from the scene. Leconte de Lisle’s animals cease to present allegories of human types or autobiographical projections of the artist’s temperament; instead, the creatures and landscapes in these poems exist on their own, and attain an expressivity not indexed to any human structures of meaning. An alien subjectivity emerges in place of human consciousness that, while irreducible to the animal’s unknowable perceptions, builds on the vigilant ‘attentiveness’ manifested in various ways by the vast array of living forms embedded in nature.

Elizabeth Bishop's ‘Pink Dog’ and other non-human animals

‘Elizabeth Bishop's “Pink Dog” and other non-human animals' examines Bishop's late poem ‘Pink Dog’ which features a female street dog in Rio de Janeiro. I argue that although scholarship to date on this poem has focused solely on the dog as a metaphor for human conditions, human beings are not necessarily central to the poem's grammatical structure. Human-centred assumptions concerning man's dominance over animals is not honoured in Bishop's poems in general, and this animal ethics partially accounts for the enigmatic, other-worldly quality so often noted of her poems featuring animals. The article responds to current topics in post-humanist animal ethics while offering close readings of other animal poems including the more well-known ‘The Moose' and ‘The Fish'.

Biodiversity and ecological imagination in the poems of Yun gon-gang - Focussed on 『A collection of animal poems 』-

Biodiversity and ecological imagination in the poems of Yun gon-gang - Focussed on 『A collection of animal poems 』-