The idea that every creature has its own reality scared poets at the beginning of the twentieth century, 

made some of them feel we were groping blindly — it in effect kicked us out of a comfortable anthropocentric community — 

but it also allowed some modern poets this sense of absolute mystery at the core of existence.

It came of knowing that we would never know exactly what a bird’s experience is, or what an ant’s experience is. 

It said we move among great powers and mysteries and only glimpse their meanings, 

the meaning of what it’s like to be another creature, 

and therefore also the meaning of being a self, a person. 

         ~ Robert Hass