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When Poet Meets Penguin: British Verse Confronts Exotic Avifauna

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Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ((PSAAL))

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Abstract

John Aikin’s Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (1777), complaining of the staleness of natural descriptions in modern poetry, promotes closer attention by poets ‘to the real state of nature’ and suggests that most productive of novelty would be attention to ‘the polar and tropical parts of the globe’. The incorporation of such exotic birds into British poetry proves difficult precisely because these birds do not come pre-loaded with meanings that can be efficiently evoked within verse. This chapter discusses how poems from the last quarter of the century incorporate ornithological discoveries from South Sea voyages, investing new birds with older significance. To create these meanings, poems such as Anna Seward’s Elegy on Captain Cook, transforming materials from Cook’s journals (1777), and Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, adapting ornithological observations from Shelvocke’s Voyage round the World (1726), imaginatively reshape the birds, erasing what is most exotic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    J[ohn] Aikin, An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (Warrington: J. Johnson, 1777), 1–2.

  2. 2.

    C. T. O. [Henry Headley], ‘Mr. Pennant’s Zoology considered,’ Gentleman’s Magazine 56 (1786): 839.

  3. 3.

    [Henry Headley], An Invocation to Melancholy. A Fragment (Oxford: [no publ.], 1785), 12.

  4. 4.

    Josep del Hoyo, Andrew Elliott, and Jordi Sargatal, eds., Handbook of the Birds of the World (Barcelona: Lynx Edicions, 1992), 1:222.

  5. 5.

    Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, in Critical Theory since Plato, 3rd ed., ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005), 796–805.

  6. 6.

    Thomas Pennant, British Zoology (London: Benjamin White, 1768), 2:401, 407, 517.

  7. 7.

    James Cook, A Voyage towards the South Pole, and round the World, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777), 1:50.

  8. 8.

    Elsdon Best, Maori Religion and Mythology, Part 1 (1924; reprint Wellington: A. R. Shearer, 1976), 346–47.

  9. 9.

    [Anna] Seward, Elegy on Captain Cook. To which is added, An Ode to the Sun (London: J. Dodsley, 1780), 12.

  10. 10.

    The illustrative plate, labelled ‘Poe-bird, New Zeeland’, comes between pp. 96 and 97. In the published journal text, the bird is spelled ‘poy-bird’.

  11. 11.

    Seward, Elegy, 6.

  12. 12.

    Edmund Spenser, The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, 11 vols. ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al. (London: Oxford University Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932), 1:127.

  13. 13.

    Seward, Elegy, 9.

  14. 14.

    See Benj[amin] Martin, Bibliotheca Technologica: or, a Philological Library of Literary Arts and Sciences (London: John Noon, 1737), 112: ‘Among the Birds, the Hawk was sacred to Apollo; the Eagle to Jove; the Goose to Juno….’

  15. 15.

    Seward, Elegy, 8.

  16. 16.

    [Samuel T. Coleridge], ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,’ in Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (London: J. & A. Arch, 1798), 12. Quotations are from this first published version unless otherwise specified.

  17. 17.

    John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927; New York: Vintage, 1959), 208.

  18. 18.

    The Sooty Albatross is now in 2016 designated as Phoebetria fusca.

  19. 19.

    ‘I shall not thank by name my colleagues in the Museum of Comparative Zoology for expert information entrusted to a layman; they might not thank me’ (Lowes, Road to Xanadu, 484).

  20. 20.

    Lowes, Road to Xanadu, 203.

  21. 21.

    George Shelvocke, A Voyage round the World by Way of the Great South Sea (London: J. Senex, 1726), 60.

  22. 22.

    Shelvocke, Voyage, 72–73.

  23. 23.

    George Whalley, ‘The Mariner and the Albatross,’ Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967), 44.

  24. 24.

    Paul H. Fry, ‘Biographical and Historical Contexts,’ in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ed. Paul H. Fry (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 20.

  25. 25.

    Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 164–65.

  26. 26.

    Julian Fitter and Don Merton, A Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 22.

  27. 27.

    Melville, Moby-Dick, 165.

  28. 28.

    Edward S. Gruson, Words for Birds: A Lexicon of North American Birds (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 7.

  29. 29.

    S. T. Coleridge, Esq., ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ in Sibylline Leaves: A Collection of Poems (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), 6.

  30. 30.

    Tim Low, Where Song Began: Australia’s Birds and How They Changed the World (Australia: Viking-Penguin, 2014), 63.

  31. 31.

    Alfred R. Wallace, ‘Attempts at a Natural Arrangement of Birds,’ The Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 2nd ser. 18 (1856): 194.

  32. 32.

    William Empson, ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (1964), in Modern Critical Interpretations: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 22–23.

  33. 33.

    Warren Stevenson, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as Epic Symbol’ (1976), in Modern Critical Interpretations: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 54.

  34. 34.

    Fry, Rime, 20.

  35. 35.

    May Swenson, ‘Goodbye, Goldeneye,’ in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, shorter 4th edition, eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 883.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Humanities, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Greensburg, PA, USA

    Sayre Greenfield

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  1. Sayre Greenfield
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Correspondence to Sayre Greenfield .

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  1. Department of Humanities, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Brycchan Carey

  2. Division of Humanities, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Greensburg, PA, USA

    Sayre Greenfield

  3. Department of English, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Anne Milne

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Greenfield, S. (2020). When Poet Meets Penguin: British Verse Confronts Exotic Avifauna. In: Carey, B., Greenfield, S., Milne, A. (eds) Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_11

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