American Journal of Philology

Mark Payne’s elegant and unusual book addresses an elusive topic: human perceptions of animal consciousness. Focusing largely on literary artists’ senses of other animals, Payne initially approaches the conundrum of how these artists devise ways to bridge this gap from a broad but distinctly personal perspective. He takes the reader with him out into a natural setting, complete with details such as the beers he drank in the evening and the driftwood on which he hung his clothes to swim, and puzzles over how we as humans make meaning from and with animals. Payne’s personally imbedded starting point grounds his insistence from the outset that we share certain aspects of our behaviors with animals and that we may even through particular experience countenance something of what might be called the animal perspective. To put it this way, however, somehow reduces the attentive grace with which Payne navigates such profound topics; while his concerns are essentially existential he is also after the delicate distinctions among phenomena that open out onto animal being, the diversities of which certain types of literary expression seek to capture.

The book is divided into two sections of two chapters each, running from tropes and inhabitations of the “beast in pain” to articulations of human-animal experiences (embraced as “becoming something else”). Payne begins his exploration of how poets take account of animal lives by addressing their use of bestial otherness to capture abject and aggressive outsider experiences. As Payne demonstrates, the archaic poet Archilochus flashes his brilliant and disturbing poetic control of animal subjectivity as a means of antagonistic warning to his enemies and other iambic targets. Hipponax in contrast appears to offer up more fully inhabited images of the dog when he is down—that is, the scapegoat, the quintessential figure of abjection, the human reduced to animal status and rejected by the community of men. Hipponax is also the inventor of the iambic meter that famously “limped,” a deformity of rhythm that interested the modern American poet William Carlos Williams. In a wonderfully rich and responsive discussion, Payne shows how in his long (and last) poem, Patterson, Williams shapes his subjectivity as a “dog poet” by means of a similar inhabitation of the deformed or lowly animal, whose perspective is then celebrated as more attuned to the songs close to the ground: the sounds of the river’s run, the very local details attended [End Page 696] to by bug or snail. Here Payne claims that Williams’ “biopoetics” “keeps an ear open for the lameness of Hipponax’s choliamb in its efforts to communicate the experience of physical impediment by formal means” (48). He reveals the details of this formal engagement by tracking Williams’ use of triadic structures to capture human-animal incapacities and the vulnerabilities of imaginative work.

The second discussion in this section takes on violent rejections of the continuities of human-animal experiences, which Payne likens to the myth of Satan because of the narcissistic hatred of other life forms that is central to its dynamics. This “destructivism” (a term Payne borrows from the American poet Susan Howe) originates in a sense of homelessness in the world and results in a groundless need to kill other animals, as well as in the fetishization of the artificial and inorganic. Payne’s poetic sources run from Milton to Flaubert, in whose descriptions of these lost killers he locates metonymies of this turn to artificiality. While there is something mildly disturbing in the apparently uncritical ways in which Payne represents this murderous perspective—so that, for instance, Symbolist aesthetics become consonant with its “biocide”—he captures effectively the dark fascination of this rejection of so much that is living. Against the human tendency to mass decimation of other life forms Payne sets the imagination’s attention to the “thisness” of individual things and beings. Gerard Manley Hopkins and, perhaps more surprisingly, Ezra Pound provide for Payne examples of modern poets who unfold...