ABSTRACT
This chapter is about a set of twentieth-century poems that are haunted by the specter of Adam, whose naming of the animals in Genesis—to which they allude, explicitly or implicitly—lingers as a point of comparison and a lost, irretrievable ideal. In Donna Haraway’s view, interspecies love—which she calls “otherness-in-relation”—is a “two-way conversation”; naming is a one-way street. If, in the primordial past, symbolic language once emerged as the lovechild of close encounters with them, in the capitalist present, it only creates distance by placing them within ever more elaborate representational frames: “All animals appear like fish seen through the plate glass of an aquarium”. As Anne Carson observes, all love poetry abides by the original definition of metaphor in Aristotle’s Rhetoric: “To give names to nameless things by transference from things kindred or similar in appearance”.
