Associate Dean of Faculty and Professor of Literature Onno Oerlemans published the essay "Sing and Be Heard: Birdsong and the Romantic Lyric" in the interdisciplinary journal Mosaic.
The essay argues that there are interesting connections between birdsong and poetry, similarities that poets themselves have recognized and attempted to articulate. Looking especially at John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Nightingale," the essay shows how poetry can bring us to a closer awareness of the complexity of animal being and that poetry, like birdsong, is a way of communicating back to the world.
