Anne Carson

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Anne Carson

Canadian poet

Written by Kathleen Kuiper

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Born:: June 21, 1950, Toronto, Ontario, Canada (age 74)

Notable Works:: “Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse”; “Economy of the Unlost”; “Electra”; “Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay”; “Nox”; “The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”; “The Glass Essay”

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Anne Carson (born June 21, 1950, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and classicist whose work treats classical subjects in what has been called a postmodern fashion. Carson’s genre-averse approach to writing mixes poetry with essay, literary criticism, and other forms of prose, and her style is at once quirky, inventive, and erudite.

Background and education

The daughter of a banker and a housewife (Robert and Margaret Carson), Carson grew up in a number of small Canadian towns. She was inspired by a high-school Latin teacher to study Greek, and, after a few diversions, received bachelor’s (1974), master’s (1975), and doctorate (1981) degrees in classics from the University of Toronto. She also attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she studied Greek metrical structures, and she received a diploma in classics there in 1976. She taught at a number of schools in Canada and the United States, including Princeton University, New Jersey; Emory University, Atlanta; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and McGill University, Montreal. She received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2000.

Poetry

Part translation, part literary history, and part philosophy, Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986, reissued 1998), is an examination of the nature of desire. The short essays (or prose poems) on several topics that comprise Short Talks (1992) were incorporated into Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (1995), a volume with water as its central metaphor. Glass, Irony, and God (1995) contains a quiet but wildly expressive poem, “The Glass Essay,” in which the narrator, while visiting her mother, meditates on a relationship gone bad, on English novelist and poet Emily Brontë (whom she is reading), and on a variety of other interrelated topics.

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Poetry: First Lines

In Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998), inspired by the work of the 5th-century-bce Greek poet Stesichorus (Stesichoros), Carson transforms the ancient Greek myth of Heracles (Hercules) and Geryon—in mythology, a triple-bodied red-winged monster the theft of whose cattle is a canonical Labour of Heracles—into a modern story of unrequited love. The work had a surprisingly broad audience for a book of its nature. Carson also penned a sequel, Red Doc> (2013), in which Heracles and Geryon—renamed Sad and G, respectively—wander a series of mythologically inflected landscapes. It received the Griffin Poetry Prize. In another unexpected juxtaposition, she made a solid connection between Simonides of Ceos, a 6th–5th-century-bce Greek poet, and the 20th-century Romanian-born German-language poet Paul Celan in Economy of the Unlost (1999).

Time is the essential subject of Men in the Off Hours (2000; Griffin Poetry Prize), and poet John Keats’s treatment of the subject of beauty is the takeoff point for a further examination of beauty, desire, and marriage in The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001). For the work, Carson became the first woman to win the T.S. Eliot Prize. Decreation (2005), composed of poetry, essays, and opera, reflects on jealousy. The middle section of the opera libretto, called “Her Mirror of Simple Souls”—an appreciation of the work of the martyred 13th-century mystic Marguerite Porete—was produced in 1999 as an “opera installation.” Carson’s work Nox (2010; “Night”) is a sort of art book—containing reflections on the life and death of her elder brother, Michael Carson. Float, a volume of poetry and essays, was published in 2016.

Carson published Wrong Norma in 2024, a collection of prose poems about a broad range of subjects, from the British writer Joseph Conrad to snow to Carson’s father. As Carson declared, “The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’” The collection was shortlisted for a National Book Award for poetry.

Translations and other works

Anne CarsonCanadian poet Anne Carson speaking at The Shed, a cultural arts center in New York City, 2018.

Carson’s translations of ancient works, some of which have drawn fire from more literal-minded classicists, include Sophocles’ Electra (2001) and Antigonick (2012; a retelling of Antigone), If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), and Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (2006). An Oresteia (2009) contains translations of plays by Aeschylus and others. Euripides’ plays also inspired several other works, including Norma Jeane Baker of Troy (2019; Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry), in which Carson re-envisioned Helen, with Marilyn Monroe in the title role. The work was first staged in 2019. Carson also collaborated with illustrator Rosanna Bruno on the comic book The Trojan Women (2021), an irreverent take on Euripides’ classic play.

In 2021 Carson received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

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Greek literature

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Greek literature

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Key People:: Ezra Pound; Poliziano; Theodore Metochites; Maximus Planudes; Bessarion

Related Topics:: New Comedy; Ancient Greek literature; Byzantine Greek literature; Modern Greek literature; Homeric epics

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Greek literature, body of writings in the Greek language, with a continuous history extending from the 1st millennium bc to the present day. From the beginning its writers were Greeks living not only in Greece proper but also in Asia Minor, the Aegean Islands, and Magna Graecia (Sicily and southern Italy). Later, after the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek became the common language of the eastern Mediterranean lands and then of the Byzantine Empire. Literature in Greek was produced not only over a much wider area but also by those whose mother tongue was not Greek. Even before the Turkish conquest (1453) the area had begun to shrink again, and now it is chiefly confined to Greece and Cyprus.

Ancient Greek literature

Of the literature of ancient Greece only a relatively small proportion survives. Yet it remains important, not only because much of it is of supreme quality but also because until the mid-19th century the greater part of the literature of the Western world was produced by writers who were familiar with the Greek tradition, either directly or through the medium of Latin, who were conscious that the forms they used were mostly of Greek invention, and who took for granted in their readers some familiarity with Classical literature.

The periods

The history of ancient Greek literature may be divided into three periods: Archaic (to the end of the 6th century bc); Classical (5th and 4th centuries bc); and Hellenistic and Greco-Roman (3rd century bc onward).

Archaic period, to the end of the 6th century bc

The Greeks created poetry before they made use of writing for literary purposes, and from the beginning their poetry was intended to be sung or recited. (The art of writing was little known before the 7th century bc. The script used in Crete and Mycenae during the 2nd millennium bc [Linear B] is not known to have been employed for other than administrative purposes, and after the destruction of the Mycenaean cities it was forgotten.)

Its subject was myth—part legend, based sometimes on the dim memory of historical events; part folktale; and part religious speculation. But since the myths were not associated with any religious dogma, even though they often treated of gods and heroic mortals, they were not authoritative and could be varied by a poet to express new concepts.

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Thus, at an early stage Greek thought was advanced as poets refashioned their materials; and to this stage of Archaic poetry belonged the epics ascribed to Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, retelling intermingled history and myth of the Mycenaean Age. These two great poems, standing at the beginning of Greek literature, established most of the literary conventions of the epic poem. The didactic poetry of Hesiod (c. 700 bc) was probably later in composition than Homer’s epics and, though different in theme and treatment, continued the epic tradition.

The several types of Greek lyric poetry originated in the Archaic period among the poets of the Aegean Islands and of Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor. Archilochus of Paros, of the 7th century bc, was the earliest Greek poet to employ the forms of elegy (in which the epic verse line alternated with a shorter line) and of personal lyric poetry. His work was very highly rated by the ancient Greeks but survives only in fragments; its forms and metrical patterns—the elegiac couplet and a variety of lyric metres—were taken up by a succession of Ionian poets. At the beginning of the 6th century Alcaeus and Sappho, composing in the Aeolic dialect of Lesbos, produced lyric poetry mostly in the metres named after them (the alcaic and the sapphic), which Horace was later to adapt to Latin poetry. No other poets of ancient Greece entered into so close a personal relationship with the reader as Alcaeus, Sappho, and Archilochus do. They were succeeded by Anacreon of Teos, in Ionia, who, like Archilochus, composed his lyrics in the Ionic dialect. Choral lyric, with musical accompaniment, belonged to the Dorian tradition and its dialect, and its representative poets in the period were Alcman in Sparta and Stesichorus in Sicily.

Both tragedy and comedy had their origins in Greece. “Tragic” choruses are said to have existed in Dorian Greece around 600 bc, and in a rudimentary dramatic form tragedy became part of the most famous of the Dionysian festivals, the Great, or City, Dionysia at Athens, about 534. Comedy, too, originated partly in Dorian Greece and developed in Attica, where it was officially recognized rather later than tragedy. Both were connected with the worship of Dionysus, god of fruitfulness and of wine and ecstasy.

Written codes of law were the earliest form of prose and were appearing by the end of the 7th century, when knowledge of reading and writing was becoming more widespread. No prose writer is known earlier than Pherecydes of Syros (c. 550 bc), who wrote about the beginnings of the world; but the earliest considerable author was Hecataeus of Miletus, who wrote about both the mythical past and the geography of the Mediterranean and surrounding lands. To Aesop, a semi-historical, semi-mythological character of the mid-6th century, have been attributed the moralizing beast fables inherited by later writers.