A constellation of virtues: Horses in 20th century American poetry

I teach a course called the Literature of the American Wild in which I attempt to give students a cross country celebration of the United States’ natural glory—oceans and plains, valleys and mountains, deserts and swamps…and loads of creatures. Javier Zamora’s desert coyote, Anne Dillard’s giant water bugs, Ahab’s white whale. But Edward Abbey’s “The Moon Eyed Horse” from Desert Solitaire got me thinking about how grateful I am that there are horses in our world. Not just as a Texan who sometimes (not often enough) gets to ride one, but as someone who has encountered some amazing horses in stories and history. The allegorical horses of Plato’s Phaedrus, the noble Houyhnhnms of Gulliver, Crazy Horse, the wild horses on Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers, countless horses from movies, and even Quixote’s bag of bones Rocinante. And some more that I’ve discovered in American poetry. Like the horses I discovered in Afaa Michael Weaver’s “The Appaloosa” and James Wright’s “A Blessing”.