Animals in Classic American Poetry

In this companion volume to Animals in theAmerican Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction, John Cullen Gruesser brings together leading experts who explore the integral role animals play in American poetry. The ten essays in Animals in Classic American Poetry: How Natural History Inspired Great Verse showcase how the natural history of and imagery relating to animals have inspired some of America’s best-known and most beloved poets.

The book highlights exceptional literary verse from the first American to publish a book of poems, Puritan Anne Bradstreet in the seventeenth century, to the African American writer Yusef Komunyakaa and the Native American Joy Harjo, a recent US poet laureate, in the twenty-first century. Essays on the well-known figures Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop round out this pathbreaking collection.

Animals in Classic AmericanPoetry provides a glimpse into the brilliant, burrowing, and passionate minds of some of America’s most revered poets. Whether it is Poe’s haunting, hybrid description of a raven, Emily Dickinson’s nostalgic yet chilling observations about a garter snake, or Robert Frost’s unsettled and unsettling ruminations about a spider consuming a moth, each poet reflects on what it means to be a nonhuman and a human animal. 

Not just for students, professors, and scholars of literature, this unique project will appeal to scientists and general readers because of the truly interdisciplinary way in which it examines our biodiverse natural world through the lens of unforgettable American poetry.