Perhaps the strangest owl song in English poetry was given to us by Dickinson's near contemporary Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He's not the kind of poet we would usually thing of as a proto-modernist, but his Song of the Owl, based on the work of ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft reads like a cross between Louis Zukofsky and Jerome Rothenberg performing at some minimalist slam. It's a long way from Shakespeare's "Tu-whit;/Tu-who, a merry note".
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