In Sheep's Clothing: The Verbal Animal and Negative Zootheology in John Berryman's Dream Psalm

Abstract: What can be said about animal interiority? John Berryman's "Snow Line" suggests that we can talk about nonhuman consciousness only in the way we can talk about God: apophatically. His sheep persona poem, alongside its precedent Psalm 23, offers a definitive exploration of apophasis in theological and zoological terms. Emergent in the poem is a negative zoology in formation, here reformulated via Jacques Derrida's "divinanimality" and "negative zootheology": its loping negations and sheep figurations unsteady readings of the imago dei and paradoxically suggest that poetic language may be uniquely suited for expressing the unknowable and unsayable.