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

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.