In Conversation with the Dead: An Introduction to Anne Carson’s Oeuvre

In his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”

T. S. Eliot declared, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” Perhaps no other writer in the twenty-first century has understood this better than Anne Carson, the latest Nobel laureate in literature, who also won the T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry in 2001. The Nobel Committee awarded Carson the prize. So, what sets Carson apart from her contemporaries, and makes her poetry and writing so distinctive? The answer may lie in how effortlessly and relentlessly she moves between ancient and the present throughout her career. When a journalist recently asked about the best book she had read last year, she replied wittily that she mostly reads books written in 500 BC, so the answer had to be Homer. Like Eliot, Carson is a classicist. She has taught classics at universities including Princeton, New York, and McGill. She has translated Greek tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as Sappho’s fragmentary poetry. Her creative writing can be seen as a by-product of her rendezvous with classical literature—or vice versa. The transition everywhere is seamless.

Her writing is experimental, and most of it defies genre and category boundaries. Her first book, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (1986), is a reworking of her doctoral thesis. Its exploration of the ancient Greek idea of ‘eros’ has remained influential among classicists in academia and beyond. But it was her long poem “The Glass Essay,” from the volume Glass, Irony, and God (1995), that secured her a place among the literary greats. It is unconventional in the sense that it blurs the boundaries between lyrics and narrative. Her personal longing becomes one with Emily Brontë: “Whenever I visit my mother/ I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë.” In Plainwater, published the same year, she imagines interviewing Mimnermos, an ancient Greek poet brought into the present day. The collection includes renderings of painters, musicians, and writers, from classical authors to Franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Emily and Charlotte Brontë. Her deeper connection with the dead poets is evident in poems like “Sylvia Town:” “The burners and the starvers./Came green April./Burning and starving her./Eyes pulled up like roots./Lay on the desk.” In another prose poem, she writes about the Roman poet Ovid as she does about her contemporaries: “Now Ovid is weeping. Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.” In Men in the Off Hours (2000), she becomes more polyphonic through her distinctive style of combining prose with poems in different genres. Many artists’ and writers’ voices can be found within her. She is one and, at the same time, many—like a chorus in a Greek play. To her, literary giants from different eras, such as Thucydides and Virginia Woolf, can be read together; her poetry and prose thus tease the limits of intertextuality. In one of his articles, French author Édouard Louis points out this special quality of hers: “In her rewriting of Antigone, in the first scene, Antigone and her sister Ismene talk about Hegel. And yet, in Carson’s play, the conversation happens as if entirely normal, as if the ancient Greek Antigone and Ismene really had discussed Hegel together.” Her poetry also mixes classical and other languages, a practice favoured by modernist poets such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. At times, she takes an avant-garde approach, combining block quotations with pages pasted directly from other writings. In her verse novel Autobiography of Red (1998), which many consider her magnum opus, Carson transforms a fragmentary poem by the Greek poet Stesichorus into an episodic narrative. The original story of Heracles killing a monster named Geryon becomes a tale of young Geryon’s homosexual longing for Heracles and the heartbreak that follows. In her text Nox (2010), printed on a continuous sheet, the distinction between the personal and the universal collapses. It begins with a photograph of a Roman elegy by the poet Catullus, which Carson uses as an epitaph for her brother, who died abroad. Through ancient and cultural references, she delves into her memories of him. The book challenges traditional notions of archiving memory and, perhaps, reimagines what a book can be.

In short, Anne Carson elevated anachronism to a level of fine art. She is rooted in tradition, yet flamboyant in her approach to it. Rather than revere the ancient, she shakes its hand and interrogates what has been passed down through the generations, from ancient times to the medieval and modern. As the dead poets and artists are dramatically resurrected in her works, she becomes their interlocutor. In her poems, she seems to think through the lives of poets and thinkers, carrying on from where they left off—whether Aristotle or the Spartan poet Alkman. Carson’s name will be etched forever, not only as one of the finest poets of her generation, but also as someone who lived alongside the dead.