Animals in Classic American Poetry

How Natural History Inspired Great Verse

John Cullen Gruesser, Mary McAleer Balkun, Margarida Vale de Gato , Aaron Moe

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English

Texas A & M University Press
31 May 2025

Literary studies: poetry & poets; Zoology & animal sciences; The natural world, country life & pets

Series: Integrative Natural History Series, Sponsored by the Museum of Natural History Collections, Sam Houston State University

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.

Contributions by: Mary McAleer Balkun, Margarida Vale de Gato, Aaron Moe, Brian Yothers
Edited by: John Cullen Gruesser
Imprint: Texas A & M University Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781648433030
ISBN 10: 1648433030
Series: Integrative Natural History Series, Sponsored by the Museum of Natural History Collections, Sam Houston State University
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 31 May 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

John Cullen Gruesser is research scholar, Natural History Collections, at Sam Houston State University and emeritus professor of English at Kean University. The author of Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts and A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs: The Man on the Firing Line, he is the coeditor of a classroom edition of Pauline E. Hopkins’s novel Hagar’s Daughter and African American Writers Respond to Poe, a special issue of the journal Poe Studies: History, Theory, Interpretation.