Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 2,0, RWTH Aachen University, language: English, abstract: “Poetry has “a place for the genuine,” and Moore’s favoring of animals as poetic subjects is a tribute to their genuineness.” (Allen 1939, 112) In my term paper I want to deal with her special interest in animals. I want to find out why she uses animals in her poems and what function they fulfil. In order to do so, I will first have a look at her poems in general to discover what kind of animals she uses and with which frequency. I will also look at her life outside of the poet’s world in order to understand where her influences came from. I will then pick out two of her animal poems to make a more specific analysis on them in order to see what the different functions of animals are and how they are presented. The first example will be Marianne Moore’s poem To a giraffe which will then be compared to a second poem The arctic ox (or goat). In a next step I want to give an overview over the other functions of animals used in Marianne Moore’s poetry. To understand the quantity and frequency of animal use in her works I will consider another by Marianne Moore which is called The Jerboa. Because of its length I will not analyze this poem in detail, but I will present the most important aspects in regard to the functions of animals given in this frequently cited and interpreted poem.

This book argues that there are deep connections between ‘poetic’ thinking and the sensitive recognition of creaturely others. It explores this proposition in relation to four poets: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, and Les Murray. Through a series of close readings, and by paying close attention to issues of sound, rhythm, simile, metaphor, and image, it explores how poetry cultivates a special openness towards animal others. The thinking behind this book is inspired by J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. In particular, it takes up that book’s suggestion that poetry invites us to relate to animals in an open-ended and sympathetic manner. Poets, according to Elizabeth Costello, the book’s protagonist, ‘return the living, electric being to language’, and, doing so, compel us to open our hearts towards animals and the claims they make upon us. There are special affinities, for her, between the music of poetry and the recognition of others. But what might it mean to say that poets to return life to language? And why might this have any bearing on our relationship with animals? Beyond offering many suggestive starting points, Elizabeth Costello says very little about the nature of poetry’s special relationship with the animal; one aim of this study, then, is to ask of what this relationship consists, not least by examining the various ways poets have bodied forth animals in language.

Elizabeth Bishop: A Biography of a Poetry is a fascinating account of one of the most influential and beloved poets of the past fifty years. Writing a clean, spare poetry of elegance, lucidity, and great charm, Bishop appears to offer small insight into her private life, wryly remarking that confessional poets 'overdo the morbidity.'

A landmark definitive edition of one of our most innovative and beloved poets The landmark oeuvre of Marianne Moore, one of the major inventors of poetic modernism, has had no straight path from beginning to end; until now, there has been no good vantage point from which to see the body of her remarkable work as a whole. Throughout her life Moore arranged and rearranged, visited and revisited, a large majority of her existing poetry, always adding new work interspersed among revised poems. This makes sorting out the complex textual history that she left behind a pressing task if we mean to represent her work as a poet in a way that gives us a complete picture. New Collected Poems offers an answer to the question of how to represent the work of a poet so skillful and singular, giving a portrait of the range of her voice and of the modernist culture she helped create. William Carlos Williams, remarking on the impeccable precision of Moore’s poems, praised “the aesthetic pleasure engendered when pure craftsmanship joins hard surfaces skillfully.” It is only in New Collected Poems that we can understand her later achievements, see how she refashioned her earlier work, and get a more complete understanding of her consummate craftsmanship, innovation, and attention to detail. Presented and collected by Heather Cass White, the foremost scholar of Moore’s work, this new collection at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of these dazzling poems as the author first envisioned them.

Why do poets write about animals? What can poetry do for animals and what can animals do for poetry? In some cases, poetry inscribes meaning on animals, turning them into symbols or caricatures and bringing them into the confines of human culture. It also reveals and revels in the complexity of animals. Poetry, through its great variety and its inherently experimental nature, has embraced the multifaceted nature of animals to cross, blur, and reimagine the boundaries between human and animal. In Poetry and Animals, Onno Oerlemans explores a broad range of English-language poetry about animals from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. He presents a taxonomy of kinds of animal poems, breaking down the categories and binary oppositions at the root of human thinking about animals. The book considers several different types of poetry: allegorical poems, poems about “the animal” broadly conceived, poems about species of animal, poems about individual animals or the animal as individual, and poems about hybrids and hybridity. Through careful readings of dozens of poems that reveal generous and often sympathetic approaches to recognizing and valuing animals’ difference and similarity, Oerlemans demonstrates how the forms and modes of poetry can sensitize us to the moral standing of animals and give us new ways to think through the problems of the human-animal divide.