In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the coursing of hares became a more regulated pastime. Yet, it was during this same period that the writers generally known as ‘Romantic’ began to conceive of the relation between species in a more holistic way. A deepening sympathy with the plight of the pursued, typically a hare, can be seen in previous writing by William Cowper, James Thompson and Joseph Addison. By contrast, in a handful of poems William Wordsworth reveals a comparable interest in the conduct of the hare’s traditional pursuer, the greyhound dog. Two other poets with universalising sympathies are singled out for scrutiny: John Clare and Anne Brontë. However, it is the poet and chronicler of rural life in her series Our Village, Mary Russell Mitford, a devoted owner of coursing greyhounds, who receives the most attention. Mitford’s immersion in the sport helped determine attitudes that made her a popular writer throughout the Victorian era. By the twentieth century few poets wished to draw on the language of coursing unless to point out its redundancy: Christopher Reid and Paul Muldoon provide contemporary examples.