Poems as animals

From the Economist's Intelligent Life blog: "Ted Hughes didn't just write a lot of poems about animals — about pikes and jaguars and thought-foxes. He thought of poems as animals. 'They have their own life,' he wrote in an essay in 1967, '…and nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them.' The poet Alice Oswald, who has just published a new selection of Hughes's animal poems called 'A Ted Hughes Bestiary,' said, 'He was interested in making poems that were alive.'"