Abstract

This chapter focuses on Costello’s argument that only poetry, and not philosophy, can provide true access to animal life. It first presents the background of Costello’s argument, that is, the so-called literary turn that took place in the last decades of the twentieth century and argued for the need to complement philosophical arguments with the imaginative élan of literature. It then complicates these theses with the positions proposed by Cora Diamond and Iris Murdoch. In particular, Murdoch’s definition of “attention” as a “just and loving gaze” is adopted as the gaze of the poet. With this theoretical frame, the chapter proposes then a brief examination of animal poetry and analyzes Rilke’s “The Panther” and Ted Hughes’ two “Jaguar” poems.