Anne Carson: An Introduction

Anne Carson is one of North America's most successful poets, as well as being an essayist, translator, and professor of Classics. She calls herself a 'maker' in the ancient Greek sense. Originally from Canada, Carson has taught at Princeton University and Bard College. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Her work can be, famously, difficult to understand and has produced many, sometimes-contradictory interpretations, including in popular culture. (Her book Eros the Bittersweet was discussed by two characters in TV's The L word). This book attempts to give the reader a key into her work by tracing some of its most important patterns of form and meaning. It is aimed mainly at undergraduate students, but should also be useful to graduate students and the general reader who wants to understand how Carson's work develops a particular set of obsessions, and how her creative vision changes over time.