Animal Poetry. The Bat is dun with wrinkled Wings and Man and Bat in connection with Thomas Nagel's essay What is it like to be a bat?

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature Works grade: 15 University of Frankfurt (Main) (Institut für England- und Amerikastudien) course: Animal Poetry language: English abstract: In my paper Thomas Nagel's essay What is it like to be a bat? will be discussed in connection with Emily Dickinson's poem The bat is dun with wrinkled wings and D. H. Lawrence's poem Man and Bat. Furthermore I want to prove in how far Nagel's basic ideas can be found in these two different poems. Thomas Nagel's basic idea is that there are some experiences that cannot be fully explained that human experience can only be subjective and that scientists though they try to analyse things cannot explain everything. In his essay What is it like to be a bat? he gives the example of persons who are blind from birth. Therefore they will never experience e.g. the colours of flowers because they have never seen them. As well as we do not know the experiences of a blind person we will never be able to understand a bat even if we know how their sonar system works.