FOREWORD
The quest for poems for this anthology has provided convincing proof that the poetry of the early English-speaking centuries is lacking in the spirit humane. Down to the middle of the eighteenth century no poet voices protest against cruelty to the lower creatures as did Montaigne in French literature, two hundred years before. Out of the ranks of the poets who sought inspiration in nature, birds, and the more beautiful of the wild animals, as the deer, no champion of humaneness arises till the age of romanticism. Occasionally a gentle note is heard, but it is quickly lost in the mighty orchestration of classical content and form. James Thomson in The Seasons makes ready the way. In his criticism of this work, Samuel Johnson remarks: "The reader of The Seasons wonders that he never saw before what Thomson shows him, and that he never felt what Thomson impresses.”
Cowper and Burns are the first to denounce man’s inhumanity to birds and other animals, and even to the lowest forms of life.
"I would not enter on my list of friends,
(Though graced with polish’d manners and
fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm,"
declares Cowper.And Burns, with a sob in his voice, cries in The Wounded Hare:
"Inhuman man! curse on thy barbarous art,
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye."
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