“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Victorian Nonhumans

Having laid the groundwork, it's time for some serious poetry analysis. This really is one of my favorite parts of the job. I'm looking through my anthologies of Victorian poetry to find anything about nonhumans. If you want to help me please post a comment.



2 comments:

Unknown said...

Rossetti's goblins, Hardy's 'Dumb Friend' and his various poems featuring ghosts. "our minds are hugely quantitatively different from other terrestrial minds but perhaps not qualitatively" (Searle).

On that note i now see the
"Please prove you're not a robot" request. ithdrne.

floccinauci said...

Seconding Hardy, for his ghosts and his trees; George Meredith for a whole cast of semi-mythic characters. You might also find George Eliot's poem "I grant you ample leave" interesting (something I'm working on now).