ABSTRACT
Some of the most recognizable Victorian writers penned poems about their pets. Yet most of these sonnets, ballads, elegies, and epitaphs remain considerably underanalyzed in part because, unlike poems on a variety of other topics, they seem to elicit, indeed even require, biographical readings. This introduction considers how such readings, in turn, trigger embarrassment because they provide glimpses of (what is perceived as) mawkish domesticity. Thus, critics have largely dismissed these poems as engaged in the conventions of maudlin, sentimental anthropomorphism from which modernist writers—praised for inaugurating a process of seriously rethinking human and nonhuman animal relations in terms of reciprocity and responsibility with which contemporary critics align themselves—are seen to depart.
