For the Animals Themselves

Editor's note: The following essay is adapted from the introduction to The Uncollected Animals: Poems for Our Nonhuman Kin, edited by John Kinsella (Turtle Point Press, 2025). 

The Uncollected Animals is a manifesto for the freedom of animals. People understand the need for and absolute right to their own freedoms, whether they have them or not. They too frequently experience the difficulty of attaining such a state when its parameters are controlled by those who would shape “freedom” in their own images or who take it away in any shape or form as and when they can. But few people seem to carry this awareness and belief across to the plight and rights of animals, whatever their reasons for not doing so. This anthology isn’t a panacea, and each poet will have their own views on the matter, but collectively there’s a statement being made here about animals and freedom. As Maya Angelou wrote, speaking analogously and symbolically to human experience:

The caged bird sings 
with a fearful trill 
of things unknown 
but longed for still 
and his tune is heard 
on the distant hill 
for the caged bird 
sings of freedom.

Before becoming a vegan animal rights advocate almost forty years ago, I had an intrinsic interest in animals — I was, like all of us, surrounded by them. I was more in contact with insects around the house I grew up in than I was with people. Wherever we live, and under whatever conditions, non-human animal life is omnipresent. We relate to it on so many conscious and unconscious levels. As I grew into an uncertain school life and experienced social pressures to “be a man,” to relate in a superior way to non-animal life, and as I learnt on farms about slaughter, eating, hunting, and “control of pests,” I performed a role I didn’t feel comfortable with and sought until I could break free of it. My brother had been obsessed with all the creatures of the world and also spent more of his time with insects than he did with people. I learnt from him. I renounced the violence of human control over animals: 

I empty the breech and drain the powder.  
I break the sights and seal the barrel.  
I renounce the hunt, the flesh, the kill.  
I embrace the sting of a cold morning,  
      the flight of the parrot, the bark  
of the fox, the utility of the rabbit. 

In selecting poems to include, my mantra was “for the animals themselves,” and not how they benefit humans. This book is not a zoo or a farmyard, it is not a pet grooming center or a slaughterhouse, nor a place of vivisection or factory farming. That does not mean that issues around these places of animal trauma don’t arise in the collection, because they do, but rather that these “uncollected animals” (the title comes from Peter Sirr’s poem of that name) are working through human articulation towards their own agency. If the animals can’t speak to us in their own interests, then the poets might speak for them. 

If such a principle for gathering poems might seem either bathetic or hubristic, it might be worth reflecting on the constant use of animals to illustrate aspects of our own lives that go unquestioned. I am not necessarily objecting to such representations and depictions in poetry-art, but I am saying that there’s a validity in trying to establish a space for the animals in their own rights. And I think the astonishing quality and array of poems in this collection affirms that notion. 

None of this is to say that many of the poems don’t clearly involve a beneficial interaction between humans and animals, but rather that the poet has been trying to articulate something specific to the animal or animals concerned. The poems are necessarily human. And the dreaded “anthropomorphism” that seems so damaging to the well-intended pro-animal poem is retrieved herein as an act of mutuality and empathy. There have been innumerable anthropomorphic animal poems that degrade and use animals as entities to serve human feelings and material values, but I think this anthology shows that they don’t have to do so. Empathy towards animals by humans is a heterogenous matter, and that empathy necessarily configures in many different ways according to culture and life-belief, and that, I hope, is acknowledged and recognized across this collection. Animal agency and freedom can be expressed by people in such very different ways. 

The deep kinships between people and animals is a cultural truism around the world, and to deny or interfere in such totemic, conceptual, and spiritual relationships would be offensive and degrading to both humans and animals. This is an anthology of cultural and spiritual respect, and consequently one that acknowledges different ways of seeing and being in the world. Further, it is an anthology that recognizes quiddity and “choice” in animal worlds as well — qualities that exist outside speciesism and classifications. 

What exists as science is not necessarily an ethical structure on which to build relationships with the rest of existence. Experiments to show whether particular animals fulfill the scientific criteria for “sentience,” whether or not they “feel pleasure or pain,” are part of the alienation of animal life from human. To be brought into ethical consideration, validation of “consciousness,” of the ability to “feel” literally and abstractly are arbitrated within the scrutiny of scientific communities whilst ignoring the knowledges and empathies of other forms of community. Animals exist in relationship to humans, and outside those relationships. 

As a long-time animal rights campaigner, I have not only challenged the use of animals to advance the life quality of humans, but also supported medical alternatives (years ago, I looked to channel income from poetry readings to the anti-vivisection Dr Hadwin Trust, now Animal Free Research). How we gain knowledge of the thinking of animals is part of the undertaking of the poet — to observe and to relate to human language through metaphor and symbol, through description and conjecture . . . through empathy. I was appalled recently to discover university experiments were being conducted on corvids using electrodes implanted in the brain to discern their level of problem solving. All 'justified', all permitted under “ethics guidelines.” Why the electrodes? Why not observation without interference. Why not a poem instead? 

Let the neurons awake, says the researcher,
justifying interventions into birdbrain
consciousness, the “singing corvids”
experiencing the business of human ethics,
                  lapsing into silence.

I hope herein that there is a dialogue between poems of different cultural poetics (from different cultural spaces) that goes “beyond” juxtaposition and simply being drawn into chronological proximity to each other. Something of the essence of knowing animals in the world, or, if not knowing (and sometimes it is far more respectful not to “know”), then being aware of the rights of non-human animal life in their various “worlds.” Really, many animal poems are less about the animals and more about human aesthetics (for bad or good), so it’s a matter of shaping a narrative that allows for diverse approaches, that brings the anthology into focus as a varied and non-compliant space. In water, air, on earth, or below ground, however these animals live their lives they have a right to remain uncollected. To expand on what this anthology is not: it is not a museum, gallery, archive, or memory bank. 

However, the historic poems in this anthology necessarily present thinking and expression of times where even the most “informed” usage of a colonial language such as English is inflected by the tropes of human-on-human oppression and exploitation. In a youthful Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s somewhat revolutionary 1794 “animal rights” poem (as we might now configure it), “To a Young Ass,” we get the identification of animal suffering with human suffering via the slave trade: 

Poor little Foal of an oppressed race!
I love the languid patience of thy face:

What is meant as association (if not identification) becomes over time a form of (unintended) demeaning. Do we read through such things, or use our understanding to push language and poetic expression further into “just” configurations? In writing about animals as animals, we will always be (necessarily) read as writing about humans, too. A poem for animals also needs a lot of thinking and a lot of empathy towards fellow humans. 

If some of these poems go far away from overt declarations of animal rights (and each of us understands such rights in different ways — for me, for example, they are absolute and share kinship with human rights, for other poets such thinking would be anathema) and are in fact more observations of animals, then that’s part of kinship as well. This work doesn’t seek to be didactic or coercive, but, as stated, empathetic. People are animals as well. 

As I said to one poet early on in the process of “gathering:” “I think many who write for this will not be vegan or vegetarian even . . . but all will be concerned for animals in their own way. I always hope such ‘projects’ (or ‘activisms!’ ) move people towards greater empathy with animals, though I understand the paths are many and not for me to dictate.” So, that’s the philosophy behind the anthology. 

Rather than a hierarchy in which humans are the “summit” or “peak biological achievement,” this anthology works laterally. An insect might sit alongside a mammal, a fish alongside a bird, and so on with infinite variation. Though arranged in chronological order by poet’s date of birth so as to show that awareness of animal rights or at least an agency of animals has been evident across cultures (be they vegetarian, “hunter gatherer,” or other often inaccurate anthropological straitjacketing prescriptions) across time, I would encourage readers to jump, hop, leap, climb, crawl, slither, swim and fly back and forth across the pages to pick up connections and subtle (and overt!) conversations going on between poems. 

You’ll find poems here from numerous countries, cultures, genders, and beliefs. You’ll find spiritual and secular poems, allegorical (but still giving animals agency) and observational poems, human-as-animal identification poems, praise and distress, merging of the conscious and unconscious, the tensions between the fabulous and the real, and confrontations with specific and broader vulnerabilities and mortality . . . it is a vibrant, confronting, joyous, disturbing, affirming, and rousing meeting place between humans and their relationships to animals in so many ways. 

The anthology includes over sixty commissioned poems, which have been an honor and joy to receive in their freshness and diverse takes on relating to our non-human kin, along with animal-referencing poems selected from historical sources that range in time from ancient Greece to the 21st century. The “historical” focus on “animal rights” is shown in poems from St Francis’s “Canticle of the Creatures” through to Thomas Hardy’s “The Puzzled Game Birds” and Sylvia Plath’s “Pheasant” — for centuries, animals have stood in poems as more than subject or object: as beings with rights akin to those of humans. 

It has been exciting, say, to collect Marianne Moore’s well-known almost iconic animal poem “The Pangolin” with an iconoclastic animal rights poem such as Lisa Gorton’s “Mirabilia,” which communes directly with the Moore, but also with a world that traffics and exploits animals out of greed. Both poems are as much about humans as they are about pangolins, and as Moore's poem draws to its close, even predominantly so. Moore in many ways epitomizes the detachment of a modernist making of “poem object” out of observation. Moore was an habitué of the zoo (many will know the 1953 photo of her with the chimpanzee at the Bronx Zoo), which to an animal rights advocate might well seem to suggest something “missing” in her perception regarding the agency of the animal itself, for all the intricacy of observation — be it in the zoo, from “nature,” or from photographs in books. Animal difference from humans (her main subject) leads to conceits and lines of reasoning far from the agency of the animal, but very often revealing about how some of us might search for a language of connection. Moore’s descriptions are cultural, of course, as much as “scientific” and “detached,” We might also be reminded of the contradictions of Rilke’s “The Panther,” which was observed by the poet at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and yet expresses the search for freedom beyond the bars of the cage. This poem has haunted me since my teens — the physicality of the panther is captured in sculptural observation by someone who had the freedom to do so. Was this witnessing or detachment, I wondered. 

The American critic Cleanth Brooks once wrote of Marianne Moore’s animal poems, maybe betraying his own limitations with regard to perceiving the full agency of animals: “She is willing to be whimsical, and even witty. She is constantly alive to the humorous collocations which the shapes and habits of her creatures set up. But the whimsy, when it occurs, is never a sniggering human-being-before-the-monkey-house kind of humor. It is as solid as that displayed by Alice toward the birds and beasts of Wonderland, and as little romantic.”¹ But animals aren’t a construct, and they are exploited, trafficked, made to serve human greed, displayed for entertainment, trapped, and caged. Moore herself saw the zoo as a place of comparative learning: use animals as a model and we benefit ourselves. And this is the problem, of course. We are seeing animals for what they are to an observer, not what they might be in themselves — as she wrote in her 1955 article “What There Is to See at the Zoo:” “If we stop to think, we will always respect chains, gates, wires or barriers of any kind that are installed to protect the animals and to keep the zoo a museum of living marvels for our pleasure and instruction.”² This is an Orwellian 1984 equation: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” And the irony of aesthetics: we might necessarily admire the sublime skill Moore brings to making her poems of and on and out of animals. They are a poetic reference point. 

Back in the late ’90s I co-wrote a book of poems with Coral Hull entitled Zoo that tried to address these issues: the zoo as prison, the circus as place of animal torment, the horrors of vivisection. When we read “animal poems,” we surely must be attuned to their limitations to speak for animals, and to read through to the animals themselves. Marianne Moore’s zoo is both a “real” and a paradoxical construct through which observations, fused with interpretive fascination, convert animals into linguistic devices. Like many in zoo-worlds who maintain the conservation/protection line with the animals they imprison (or, to their minds, tend and save), there’s a painful gap between cause and effect. Moore was, of course, also valorising animals, like many zookeepers. 

But the ways we interact with animals aren’t confined by political and social oppression, by constructs of “city” and “country,” of “wildness” and “domestication,” of the full array of stereotyping of human-non-human animal relations. Out of the liminal spaces of human-non-human animal interactions, we gain new insights regarding how animals are related to and spoken of by poets. In confronting, say, the racing industry or the slaughterhouse, we might further reflect on our own “interactions” with animals we don’t necessarily ever see but whose lives are so affected by the mechanisms of human life. The anthology also contains cultural critiques about human bigotry and human exploitation towards humans, as focalized through animals, and this has an essential place in enacting a universal empathy for living things and biological “systems.”

Further, because I have tried to be textually and prosodically diverse in making this book (as, indeed, animals are so incredibly linguistically/communications diverse), I hope to have offered readers different ways of contemplating their own relationships to animals (and not just a few familiar animals, but all animals) through reading and experiencing poems closely to uncover layers of meaning. Try Edwin Torres’s superb “The Writing of Animals.” In discussion with Torres after commissioning the work, I said: “I love this poem and it’s so incredibly linguistically powerful... my hesitation is over context and potential ‘misreading’ (maybe what you would hope for!) over the hunting “references“ and what they mean . . . I am still processing. As said, this is such an overtly animal rights anthology that I have to weigh everything up carefully.” To this, Torres responded: “I will say that the hunting references are from the viewpoint of the animal and its survival... ‘let them throw me out’ also a reference to the poet, being a sound creature, the hunting which becomes a ‘hum thing’ ‘amurmuring’... so I see the experimentation of that second part as an embodiment of creature/animal, aware of its world and thriving within that awareness.” And, of course, I see it too and get it! 

Will all readers “get” all of these poems? Maybe that’s not the point. Poetry lives in the tension between ambiguity and clarity, and so do we all in our animal lives. Interestingly, when I was collecting poems in the English Faculty Library in Cambridge (UK), I came across a friend, a professor of English, who said that there are strangely many poems that speak with animal voices deploring their fate at the hands of hunters in old/ancient hunting texts/guides. I followed up his leads and it is certainly the case. They are not collected here, as that’s another anthology which would require a highly critical introduction regarding contexts, motives, and the use the works were put to. 

For as long as it has existed, as far as we know, poetry has been emphatically connected with animals across cultures around the world, and this anthology seeks to examine animal-valorising and animal-supportive interactions and awarenesses. In compiling it I have benefited from shared Indigenous knowledges, and I have worked to respect different communal and individual connections to animal life. I strongly believe our non-human kin will benefit from broader discussions about the relationships we have with animals, and how people might work together to prevent exploitation, destruction of habitat, and extinction. I cede any rights I have in this anthology to the animals themselves. Truly.