ABSTRACT
Les Murray; and last but not least, a mosquito, by D.H. Lawrence. Everything we hope to explore here, apropos the question of animals and literature, might be illustrated on the basis of these four brief extracts. We say ‘literature’ but we need in fact to be wary: all of these examples are poems. Indeed there is, we want to suggest, something special about the relationship between poetry and animals, something that takes us, perhaps, to the very heart of what we mean by terms such as the ‘poetic’, ‘poetic language’ and even ‘poem’. And this can in turn, we will argue, illuminate in a more general way what we call literature.
