Romanticism’s Fellow Creatures

ABSTRACT

This panel opens up innovative ways of thinking about Romanticism and “the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures.” Over the last couple of decades, the crisis in human relations with animals has deteriorated to the point that it has become increasingly recognized as a constitutive part of the global environmental crisis. Like the climate crisis, the “animal crisis” originates with the emergence of the industrial form of capitalism in Britain around the turn of the nineteenth century. Appreciation of this historical constellation can and should become the basis of a renewed Romantic animal studies. However, reading Romanticism as a reflection of and on the historical origins of the contemporary crisis in human-animal relations in turn requires rethinking and openly debating topics, archive, and method. To indicate the initial results and style of our efforts, we have chosen not to summarize the papers presented, but rather to pose ten collectively formulated questions and to briefly answer as individuals a selection of three of those questions. Overall, we hope not just to make an argument for what we regard as a vital area of research in Romantic studies, but to encourage more research on the topic.

The participants on this panel were invited to think in innovative ways about Romanticism and what environmentalist Rachel Carson called “the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures” (256).¹ Attention to animals in Romantic studies dates back some two decades to books by Christine Kenyon-Jones and David Perkins that were themselves part of a more general explosion in research on animals across the humanities and social sciences. In the intervening years, a steady stream of scholarship has produced an increasingly detailed account of the meaning and significance of animals in and for Romanticism, while “animal studies” has become an established interdisciplinary field of scholarship.² During the same period, however, the way human beings collectively share, or do not share, the earth with other creatures has deteriorated to the point that it has become increasingly recognized, alongside global warming, as a constitutive part of the global environmental crisis. Taking up the conference theme of “New Romanticisms,” this panel aimed to push the scholarly conversation about Romanticism’s animals in new directions so as to make it more responsive to the contemporary crisis in human-animal relations.

One gets a sense of just how critical things have become by considering that humans and their livestock make up 36% and 60% respectively of the total biomass of land mammals on Earth, leaving wild animals to make up just 4% (Bar-On et al.). This asymmetry reflects two things. First, humans are causing the population of farmed animals to explode. Since 1961 the number of animals that humans exploit for food annually has increased by 875%, from 8 billion to 70 billion (Food and Agriculture Organization). Animal agriculture is a leading cause of climate change (Steinfeld et al. 112), but it also creates immediate problems for the farmed animals themselves. For even as it forces them to be born, it refuses to allow them to live, since it kills them all, without exception, though not after confining many of them to some of the worst places on earth, factory farms (Compassion in World Farming; Hunt). Second, humans are causing the population of wild animals to implode. Since 1970 the global population of wild mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish has declined by an average of 69% (World Wildlife Fund 32). We are starting, natural scientists warn, or have already started the sixth great mass extinction of life on earth, with many animal species among those threatened (Kolbert). The main cause of wild animal depopulation, and biodiversity loss more generally, is deforestation. And 80% of deforested land globally is converted into land for grazing cattle or into land to grow crops to feed to livestock (Intergovernmental Science-Policy 12; Pendrill et al.). We are, then, killing off the wild animals, by destroying the places where they traditionally live, in order to breed, feed, and kill more domesticated animals. We are acting, whether we know it or not, as if we have the right to decide with whom we share the earth.

What does this have to do with Romanticism? The climate crisis, scientists and scholars generally agree, originated in Britain around the turn of the nineteenth century. The same is true of what Alice Crary and Lori Gruen call the “animal crisis.” Both aspects of the environmental crisis are products of the industrial form of capitalism that emerged at the time. For the climate crisis, the decisive event was, as Andreas Malm argues, the mass transition in manufacturing, within an economy of persistent growth, from water, wind, and muscle to a non-renewable fuel, coal, as the main source of energy. For the crisis in our relations with other creatures, the turning point was the mass transition in agriculture, within the same growth economy, to new techniques and technologies for extracting value from farmed animals. While this event awaits scholarly study as the beginning of a crisis, the outlines are already clear. On the one hand, animal agriculture in Britain, which, like agriculture in general, had for some time been a predominantly for-profit rather than subsistence activity, became qualitatively more intensive, in the sense that the amount of meat, eggs, milk, wool, and so on produced from each individual animal was increased. Through artificial breeding, confinement, and new types of feed, cattle, for instance, grew bodies of unprecedented sizes, in standardized shapes, and restructured to bear more flesh in proportion to their skeletons, and did all this faster, so that they reached their slaughter weight and could be killed younger. On the other hand, animal agriculture expanded in scale, as the sheer number of animals being more intensely exploited grew to unprecedented numbers. Not only were more animals farmed per hectare; the number of hectares used for animal farming also increased (Chambers and Mingay; Overton; Turner et al.). If intensification made life more difficult for the expanded population of animals being more intensively exploited, expansion meant greater negative collateral impacts on wild animals. Most obviously, the increase in the land area used for animal farming was achieved through not just the displacement of crop farming (most famously in Scotland), but also the clearing and enclosure of “waste” land (forests, moors, fens). As a result, wild animals, whose habitats were already at a historical low, found themselves with even fewer places to live (Dawson; Lovegrove).

Appreciation of the fact that the climate crisis originates in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Britain, scholars have recently argued, opens up exciting new directions in Romantic ecocriticism (Davies). The premise of the “Romanticism’s Fellow Creatures” panel is analogous. Appreciation of the fact that our current crisis in relations with the other creatures on the planet also begins in the same place and same historical moment can and should serve as the basis for a newly oriented Romantic animal studies, one with the potential to illuminate both Romanticism and our current predicament in the twenty-first century. However, reading Romanticism as a reflection of and on the historical origins of the contemporary crisis in human-animal relations requires rethinking and openly debating topics, archive, and method. For one, we need to supplement the heavy focus in existing scholarship on representation, discourse, and ideas with close readings of our material relations with animals. Equally important is attention to attempts by various individuals and groups in the period to incorporate animals into spheres of creaturely fellowship and social justice, even to recognize them as participants in emancipatory politics. We must also learn how to read intersectional forms of oppression that affect both human beings and animals, as well as the coordinated struggles against such injustice. And we must cultivate sensitivity to unsuspected forms of historical agency, including the resistance by animal advocates and even animals themselves to exploitation and the destruction of their habitats. In order to do all this, however, we must also think carefully about new ways to read already known texts and what new texts should become part of the Romantic archive.

The papers presented at the NASSR/BARS conference over two sessions represent an initial effort to reorient and renew the scholarly conversation about animals in Romantic studies. To indicate the initial results and style of our efforts, we have chosen not to summarize the papers presented, but rather to pose ten collectively formulated questions and to have a go as individuals at briefly answering a selection of three of those questions. The questions are a mixture of ones we pursued in our papers, others that emerged during discussion, and yet others that occurred to us afterwards. Given space constraints and our particular scholarly proclivities, some questions attract multiple answers, others just one, a few none at all. However, these are questions that we believe should be central to the agenda for future research. Overall, we hope not just to make an argument for what we regard as a vital area of research in Romantic studies, but to encourage more research on the topic.

Ten questions and twelve answers

1. How do Romantic writers respond to the emergence, during the period, of an industrial form of capitalism, in manufacturing and agriculture, that exploited increasing numbers of domesticated animals and decimated wild animal populations?

The rise of industrial capitalism changed social relations, modes of labor, and methods of production. The Highland Clearances serves as a large-scale and well-known instance of this change that happens across communities during the rise of Britain as a nation. Using the Clearances as an example, sheep replace people and the farmland becomes pastures; the displaced people turn to fishing, military service, and colonial ventures all with shifts in life, culture, and economics. With industrial capitalism, people and animals are (re)located to landscapes that facilitate productivity of the region or nation as a whole rather than serve the local community. As the philosopher of inhuman geography, Kathryn Yusoff, has noted in other contexts, this is a large-scale ecological change that collapses the qualitatively different lives and worlds of animals, humans, plants, rocks, and soils into a leveled quantitative sum that can be calculated and distributed as commodities. Romantic writers tended to respond with aesthetic conservatism as Katey Castellano has illustrated in The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790–1837. Texts of the period are filled with wonder, stupefaction, and amazement over changes in agriculture. Think here of Cobbett, Clare, Bloomsfield, Burns, and Hogg. They use these primary sentiments as a driving force in their poetry and prose. We find in these works political implications as well—including how animal and human bodies are represented and move through landscapes that are materially and economically transformed (RB).

2. The enclosures of the commons are only the most well-known manifestation of a more general process by which agriculture in the Romantic period began to be industrialized. Scholars have paid considerable attention to Romanticism’s portrayal of the effects of this historical development on the lives of workers. But to what extent does writing from the period register the effects of the agricultural revolution on animals?

The social effects of the enclosures in Britain, and primitive accumulation more generally, Silvia Federici argues in Caliban and the Witch, include not just, as Marx held, the expropriation of land and the production of an exploitable army of wage laborers. They also include “an accumulation of differences and divisions” among those exploited under capitalism (63–64). The “differences and divisions” successfully weaponized by capitalism, one could add, included not just gender and “race,” but also the opposition between human beings and animals. It is, then, significant that one of the vital voices from the period that, amidst the widespread celebration of agricultural “improvement,” openly resisted the intensifying and expanding instrumentalization of farmed animals, and the collateral violence to wild animals, belongs to a member of the expropriated peasant class. Throughout John Clare’s protest against enclosure, we find repeated the claim that workers and animals, and the nonhuman in general, find themselves on the same side of an antagonism with a capitalism that expropriates and exploits them. The “foes that hurt my field,” asserts the personified piece of land Round-Oak Waters, “Hurts these poor moilers too” (lines 173–74). Just as powerful, however, is Clare’s inclusion of animals, including those classified as “vermin,” alongside workers in the despairing, hopeful vision of the commons and common right that Clare articulates in protest against the enclosures (AH).

The over 4000 Acts of Enclosure passed by the British Parliament between 1750–1850 dispossessed commoners of land that they had used cooperatively for generations. Enclosure consolidated small farms under a single owner who would then implement more profitable farming methods. The expropriation of the commons further changed everyday relationships with the natural world, since common rights such as gleaning wheat, grazing animals, and gathering firewood were criminalized. Romantic-era texts from Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” to William Wordsworth’s “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” nostalgically lamented the loss of the commons and common rights, yet these poems foreground a changed relationship to land instead of animals. Romanticist scholarship about the consequences of land enclosures also tends to read animals within broader concerns about ecology and landscape instead of focusing particularly on animals themselves. An exception is Ron Broglio’s reading of enclosure through animal studies, which reveals that enclosure’s agricultural revolution put both human and animal bodies to work. After enclosure, “The body of the laborer and that of the animal are often given value not in and for themselves but rather as a means toward serving the national prosperity” (Beasts 37). Thus unprofitable Highland farmers and their sheep must be cleared from the land, and the rural Sussex pig collapses into a swinish multitude of displaced commoners (KC).

3. To what extent do Romantic-period writers recognize the agency of animals? What forms of animal agency are on display? How might readings of Romantic texts contribute to current debates about animal agency?

2 and 3. John Clare’s close observation of the natural world records the transition of agricultural land from an open field system to private property. His enclosure elegies mark visible forms of land expropriation, such as fences, trespassing signs, and deforestation, yet they also celebrate the lives of vermin, such as moles or unwanted birds, who remain unenclosed, unproductive, and even undermine agricultural capitalism. The lives of vermin pointedly exemplify Broglio’s argument that animals and animality can be “modalities of living and dwelling [that] were at odds with the biopolitical regime” of agricultural capitalism (Beasts 8). In Clare’s enclosure elegies, animal dwellings like molehills and birds’ nests mark resistant and open animal territories just as surely as the landowners’ fences and signs mark private property. The enclosures of agricultural capitalism in the Romantic era also foreshadow the contemporary industrialization of agriculture. It follows that Romanticists working in animal studies address the totalizing violence of today’s animal agriculture, which, according to Alastair Hunt, even “organizes the births of animals in such a way as to make them a form of dying” (119). After exploring the resistance of animals to Romantic-era biopolitics, Broglio has continued to examine contemporary rebellions of animals who “jam the gears of the well-oiled social machine” (1) (KC).

4. In 1802 writer and critic Sara Trimmer contended that “the levelling system” included not just “the RIGHTS OF MAN, and the RIGHTS OF WOMEN” but also “the RIGHTS OF ANIMALS” (400). As a conservative, Trimmer herself was not happy about any of this. But is she right? What positions did animals occupy in the emergent project of emancipatory politics in the Romantic period?

It is widely known that during the Romantic period conservatives and radicals alike figured political radicals as animals (think of Burke’s insult, “swinish multitude,” and Spence’s rejoinder, “pig’s meat”). Rather less widely known is that they also figured animals themselves as subjects of emancipatory politics. For instance, in his Pantisocratic lyric “To a Young Ass,” Coleridge offers the titular donkey a place as a “brother” in the small-scale, experimental, democratic, socialist community he and Southey were at the time planning to found. The gesture is just one instance of the claim that the other creatures with whom we share the earth are not, as capitalism would have it, resources from which to extract economic value; nor are they, as the liberal animal welfare movement of the time avows, objects of kindness or generosity. Rather, our fellow creatures are among those with whom it is possible and indeed necessary to engage in the political practice of living according to principles of justice. It is true that the recognition of animals as subjects of radical politics was then, as it remains today, outside the mainstream of emancipatory struggle. My wager, however, is that an investigation of this gesture, which recurs in a constellation of poems, novels, pamphlets, and treatises by, in addition to Coleridge, Bentham, Burns, the Shelleys, and the lesser-known Thomas Taylor and John Oswald, among others, would reveal that there are essential, rather than accidental reasons, archived in the rhetoric of radical politics itself, why the scope of modern emancipation always was, and might still be, more expansive and inclusive that we have assumed (AH).

5. Scholarship on Romanticism and animals has largely reiterated Keith Thomas’s thesis in his pioneering Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (1983) that the early modern period saw unprecedented growth in moral concern for animals. How does this thesis look from our current historical moment in which, as Alice Crary and Lori Gruen argue, “human-animal relations are in a crisis of catastrophic proportions” (1)?

6. Critical race scholars, such as Bénédicte Boisseron, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Joshua Bennett, and Lindgren Johnson, have drawn attention to a tradition of diasporic African writers who, rather than claiming recognition as human beings by disassociating themselves from abjected animality, affirm solidarity with animals and envision a social justice project that is both antiracist and antispeciesist. To what extent is this sort of gesture evident in Romantic-period abolitionism?

7. Frankenstein’s monster could be the most famous ethical vegetarian from the Romantic period. The refusal to eat animals out of a concern for their well-being has an ancient history. But how are we to understand the proliferation of ethical vegetarianism in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? What is the nature and significance of the connection between Romanticism and refusing to eat animals?

While voluntary vegetarianism in a meat-eating society can always involve the pursuit of social distinction, the refusal to eat animals in the Romantic period posed direct challenges to various hierarchical divisions. In an age in which the poor still starved while the rich consumed increasing amounts of meat, vegetarianism featured in social justice arguments for crop cultivation as a more efficient way to produce food than animal husbandry. It was also associated with a socialist political economy of the commons, over and against enclosed private pastures for grazing cattle, a legacy legible in the various vegetarian utopian experiments such as Fruitlands. And vegetarianism was, of course, an expression at the level of material praxis of solidarity with our fellow creatures recognized as having as good a right to their lives as human beings do to their own. Given its challenge to economic injustice, to privatization of the commons, and to human supremacy, it is hardly surprising that vegetarianism generated anxiety. To this extent Frankenstein’s monster might well be, as Emelia Quinn has argued, the paradigmatic vegetarian in the west. But only, I would add, to the extent that the monster’s body, comprising as it does parts of poor humans from charnel houses and parts of animals from slaughter houses, signifies, as a sign made flesh, the utopian socialist tradition insight that, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “the exploitation of nature” and “the exploitation of the proletariat” can be “contrasted” only “with naive complacency” (259) (AH).

8. Skylarks, grasshoppers, spiders, chameleons, and, of course, nightingales. The Romantics repeatedly figure poets as animals and animals as poets. What does this trope tell us about Romantic poetics and the Romantic perception of animals?

When Keats ridicules Wordsworth’s egotistical sublime, he is cleverly cutting into the primary mode of Romanticism—a privileged interiority of the singular human subject. When animals do arrive on the scene in Romantic works, they are often figural. They are stand-ins for human sentiment and are beasts of burden carrying the weight of human-imposed semiotics. They are the Star Trek red shirt crew members who will be sacrificed to carry on the plot of the more important, more fully developed lead characters. The being and lives of animals are at the service of the human’s story. An adept posthumanist or anti-humanist reader can re-read some of these moments to find a world on the other side of our human worlds and narratives. Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet is the theory handbook for such an interpretative enterprise. For him, gothic and numeromancy fictions reveal in the cracks of their dark arts and demonologies a time beyond human time an earth beyond the earth-for-humans. Similarly, figurations of animals can point beyond us. Keats’s “To Autumn” is a world replete with nonhuman life and with no humans to be found. His nightingale is not simply a poetic muse but a creature with a world beyond the grasp of human imagination. What haunts us in Wordsworth’s “Ruined Cottage” is how flora and fauna, grasses and sheep, disregard what was once human habitation. Often Romantic invocation of animals points in two different directions: animals reflecting meaning for human narratives and in another view they are sentinels leading us to worlds beyond human comprehension (RB).

Romantic anthropomorphism has distinct political advantages over both its traditional and modern forms. In traditional anthropomorphism, the sort we find in animal fables, animals typically exhibit what we take to be animal characteristics (the fox is cunning, the crow vain, the lion fierce) but act, and often speak, in ways that illustrate human moral qualities. Modern anthropomorphism, in contrast, rejects the attribution of humanlike characteristics to animals: for scientists on the grounds that anthropomorphism clouds the empirical study of animal behavior; for literary critics because it amounts to falling into the so-called pathetic fallacy. When Wordsworth describes the “jocund din” of hooting owls, or Keats expresses happiness at the nightingale’s “happiness,” or Shelley claims to hear the unseen skylarks’ “shrill delight,” they are not claiming that animals possess humanlike characteristics nor are they conferring moral status on animal behavior. Rather, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, like other Romantic poets, are tracing, through poetry, forms of experience and, indeed, modes of existence, shared by humans and animals alike. The poetic representation of animals is inevitably anthropocentric in that it is an exercise of the human imagination, yet, to the extent that animals in Romantic poetry are often absent from the field of representation, we can say that, like an empty nest in a Clare poem, this form of anthropomorphism maintains its distance from animals so as to spare them at least the imaginative burden of human encroachment. The political implications of Romantic anthropomorphism are thus considerable. By comparing animal reality to human experience, Romantic anthropomorphism not only establishes the grounds for realigning our attachments to nature in non-coercive forms of multi-species coexistence; in doing so, it also shows us how naive, categorical, and other pernicious forms of anthropomorphism have contributed to catastrophic biodiversity loss and brought us closer to the sixth extinction event (MO-R).

9. What does the practice, common among naturalists during the Romantic era, of collecting, classifying, and displaying animal specimens tell us about the relation between humans and wild animals during this period?

Romantic-era natural history is inextricable from British colonial expansion, which sought to classify all life on the planet. Romantic natural history then should be understood in relation to the “translational world-making activity” of global natural history, as Alan Bewell argues (37). While certainly influenced by this larger shift to global categorization, Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1781) nonetheless prioritizes embodied experiences with animals. Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds (vol. 1, 1797; vol. 2, 1804) uses regional taxonomies, which categorized birds within their habitat on land or water instead of within the Linnaean global system. The miniature “tale-pieces” that accompanied Bewick’s bird descriptions emphasized their locality by embedding the birds within human ecologies around Northumberland. The Land Lines Project out of Leeds University, by Will Aberly, Christina Alt, David Higgins, Graham Huggan, and Pippa Marland, argues that Romantic natural history grapples with a “troubled depiction of the dynamism and unpredictability of nonhuman nature” (45). Land Lines traces Romantic-era writing to Jane Bennett’s vital materialism: the world is an assemblage of living and non-living things where there is “always a swarm of vitalities at play” (31–32). If Romantic natural history, such as Bewick’s, envisions animals within open and ongoing relationships with humans, plants, and land, perhaps this explains why animals in Romanticist scholarship are often subsumed within larger concerns about ecology and landscape (KC).

What are the limits of consciousness? We experience some persistent boundaries around the self with ego’s fear of death and loss of identity into something else, a more expansive terrain of mind. The dawn of consciousness for humans, beyond reason, is entwined with nonhumans and nonhuman sentience. Shamans, human-animal hybrids in art and legend, and animistic sensibilities are a few clues to this humanimal state of being. What if the animals are pointing us elsewhere? What if our metaphysical verticality and judgment (from upright comportment to transcendental philosophy) has it wrong? What if the comportment of animals and their adaptation around our technologies is a way of speaking, telling us there is another future that is not along our techno-capitalist teleology? With their voices and bodies, nonhumans signal (to themselves and to us) the existence of nonhuman spheres of being in the world we share. As an inheritance of the Enlightenment, fences in game parks, cages for live specimens, neat taxidermy displays, and containers for specimen provide us with an all-too-safe and insistent boundary by which to delimit the range of valid sentience and consciousness. The bars keep our boundaries of self, ego, sense, and human-ness safely contained and uncontaminated by the wild. If we are to seriously rethink naturalists of the Romantic period, we can think of them as reinforcing containment of the wild or as inviting the wild into culture and breaking barriers. Can we imagine a world of “being-with” nonhumans differently than how we comport ourselves today? Can we imagine a being-with that is not domestication or domination but cohabitation, what Donna Haraway calls “messmates” (74)? Gregory Bateson asserts, “We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself. If, now, we correct the Darwinian unit of survival to include the environment and the interaction between organism and environment, a very strange and surprising identity emerges: the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with mind” (491). Bateson here draws from a “continuously connected” model of biology, devised by geoscientist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, where “Man is elementally indivisible from the biosphere … . In reality, no living organism exists in a free state on Earth. All of these organisms are inseparably and continuously connected—first and foremost by feeding and breathing—with their material-energetic environment” (qtd. in Doyle 7). How might Romantic period naturalists be pointing to the broader field of evolutionary survival where organism plus environment becomes mind (RB).

If we were to read the work of the Romantics for the purpose of classifying animals, we would end up with a unique taxonomy of the natural world that, unlike other forms or systems of classification, would sort animals according to their relative proximity to lived experience. While eighteenth-century naturalists such as Gilbert White, William Paley, and Erasmus Darwin were devoted to tracking, identifying, and describing animals according to type, behavior, and habitat, Romantic poets may be said to have devised forms of observation that tried to capture their figurative potential. Consider the Linnaean system of classification, a comprehensive attempt to describe all living organisms by grouping them into hierarchically organized categories of increasing particularity in which each individual organism is said to belong to a kingdom, a phylum, a class, an order, a family, a genus, and a species. In contrast, the animals that appear in Romantic poetry can be roughly grouped using the following, admittedly arbitrary, criteria: wild, imaginary, vocal, absent, domesticated, elusive, baited, playful, morose, and so on. To be sure, the Romantics’ commitments to nature may have differed from those of naturalists—a difference that can be expressed, in shorthand, as the difference between intelligent design and natural supernaturalism—but perhaps it matters less that poets and naturalists differed in how they described animals than that they all, in their own way, “represented” them, that is advocated for them in the process of observing, classifying, and depicting them (MO-R).

10. The early eighteenth century saw the passing of “An Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle” by the British parliament and the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. To what extent did the representation of animal cruelty in Romantic literature (for example, badger baiting), or, for that matter, animal sentience, pave the way for legislative reform? How central should the animal welfare movement be to our understanding of developments in human-animal relations in the Romantic period and beyond?

The passage of the Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act (better known as Martin’s Act) in 1822, the first piece of legislation to address the cruel treatment of animals in Britain, has been correctly understood as a response to the public outcry at the mistreatment of cattle. But the series of legislative acts that would subsequently pave the way for the modern animal rights movement can also be traced back to the Romantic reconfiguration of human-animal relations. If, as Peter Singer suggests, animal rights are founded upon the argument, first formalized by Jeremey Bentham, that humans should take into account animal suffering when trying to describe the relation between humans and other animals, then the role of poetry, and literature more generally, in legislating the relation between humans and animals should not be minimized. More than for the representation of animal cruelty, such as we find, for instance, in Clare’s so-called Badger Sonnets—vivid and brutal as these are in portraying animal suffering—it is for its ability to cultivate an attitude of attention towards animals, and thereby establish a relation of care, that Romantic poetry ought to be credited. Indeed, we find echoes of the Romantics’ ability to shift our perspective concerning human-animal relations everywhere in the modern environmental movement. Aldo Leopold’s call to “think like a mountain,” for instance, informs the adoption of laws such as the Endangered Species Act of 1977 in the US that protected the wolves that killed the deer that had denuded the mountain of its vegetation. With respect to animals at least, poets are truly the unacknowledged legislators of the world (MO-R).

Notes

1 The panel participants were Ron Broglio, Alastair Hunt (organizer), Mario Ortiz-Robles, Kate Rigby, and Tess Somervell. Rigby and Somervell were unable to contribute to this article, but Katey Castellano, who attended the panel, graciously agreed to contribute in their place.

2 See Bruder and Connolly; Broglio, Beasts; Broglio, “Beyond Symbolism”; Buell; Carey, Greenfield, and Milne; Ferguson; Gannon; Heymans; Hutchings; Kenyon-Jones, “British Romanticism and Animals”; Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes; Menely; Morillo; Morton; Oerlemanns; Palmieri; Perkins; Pielak; Quinsey; Schwartz; Seeber; Spencer; Washington.