the glass essay anne carson

A P l a y f u l Guide to Literary Devices

Welcome to the wondrous world of literary devices! Here, we will dive deep into the realm of language and explore the many weapons in a writer’s arsenal. From metaphor to alliteration , personification to hyperbole , we’ve got it all.

If you’re an aspiring writer, you’ll want to bookmark this page faster than you can say “ onomatopoeia .” We promise to make learning about literary devices more fun than a barrel of monkeys ( simile , anyone?).

So, put on your thinking caps and grab a cup of coffee (or tea, or hot cocoa, we don’t discriminate), because we’re about to embark on a journey of wit, wordplay, and all things literary. Let’s get punny!

Device Difference

Allegorical interpretation vs symbolic interpretation: unraveling meaning in literature, allegory vs fable: understanding literary devices, allegory vs symbol: a comprehensive comparison of literary devices, allusion vs reference: unpacking literary devices, anaphora vs epistrophe: enhancing rhetoric through repetition, assonance vs consonance: a detailed comparison of sound devices in literature, bildungsroman vs coming of age story: unveiling the growth journey in literature, black comedy vs dark comedy: exploring humor in the shadows, character arc vs character development: a guide for writers, closed ending vs open ending: navigating narratives, cosmic irony vs dramatic irony: a comprehensive literary comparison, denotation vs connotation: unraveling literary devices, diction vs syntax: dissecting literary techniques, direct characterization vs indirect characterization: a literary guide, dramatic irony vs situational irony: unraveling irony in literature, dramatic monologue vs interior monologue: unpacking character narratives, dynamic character vs static character: a comprehensive literary comparison, elegy vs ode: exploring the depths of lyrical poetry, epigram vs aphorism: unveiling the wit and wisdom in concise literary forms, epilogue vs prologue: unraveling their roles in literature, a simile for me, please 🙏🏽, allegory you say. what ‘s that ⚧, allusion: wow that really takes me back, anachronism, anagram: the art of rearrangement, analogy – the informational comparison, anaphora: repetition’s first cousin, anecdote: a story within a story 📜, anthropomorphism, antithesis – anti what, aphorisms: short, memorable quotes to live by, literature analysis, 100 sideways miles, 20,000 leagues under the sea, a bend in the river, a brief history of time, a child called “it”, a child’s christmas in wales, a christmas carol, a clash of kings, a clockwork orange, a confederacy of dunces, a connecticut yankee in king arthur’s court, a court of thorns and roses, a dance to the music of time, a dance with dragons, casablanca (1942), citizen kane (1941), schindler’s list (1993), the godfather (1972), the shawshank redemption (1994), poem analysis, a disused shed in co. wexford, a fortune for your disaster, a history of bubbles, a letter to my mother that she will never read, a little devil in america, a narrow fellow in the grass, a season in hell, a woman without a country, abandoned farmhouse, after apple-picking, again, let me tell you what i know about trust, against dying, air traffic, alive at the end of the world, all they want is my money my pussy my blood, american sonnets for my past and future assassin.

A Glass Essay

Reading anne carson post-breakup.

An interior view of the Radcliffe Camera at Oxford University, where the author spent a summer re-reading Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay." Getty Images / Lonely Planet

In the last week of june 2018 , I got unexpectedly dumped. During the month that followed, I did the only thing that felt right: I read Anne Carson’s long poem “The Glass Essay” every day. I had come to Oxford to teach a summer class as England endured a historic drought, and the sun shone heartlessly, beautifully every day. Every morning I woke up, ran around the park, rushed through a shower and a coffee, and ascended to the upper reading room of the Radcliffe Camera, one of Oxford’s extravagantly beautiful libraries. I would claim my favorite desk, with my favorite graffito (“LIBIDINAL COMMUNISM”) etched in its wood frame, and lean back in my chair, staring up into the rotunda’s scrolled dome. Then, once my mind was blank and still, usually around 9:25, I’d open Carson and begin. The poem starts:

I can hear little clicks inside my dream. Night drips its silver tap down the back. At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking

of the man who left in September. His name was Law.

From the first time I read them after the breakup, these lines laced me into the poem good and tight. “The Glass Essay” is a complex structure, holding two disparate elements together in a surprising balance: an intimate meditation on a romantic breakup, and a critical reading of the life of Emily Brontë. The poem immediately became the frame I required to shape the posture of my hours. I needed to read it to stay upright during the day and to stay lying down at night. I too know that slow, cold drip down the spine because I’m a bad sleeper; at 4 a.m. I’m always either going to bed or suddenly starting awake. But the main point of identification was so obvious I didn’t even bother to note it: I was going through a breakup, and “The Glass Essay” is indisputably the greatest breakup poem ever written. (Don’t try to argue with me on this.) The urge to reread flowed out of my desire to sink further into the poem and its speaker and remain there, a desire that in turn flowed out of the deeper, inane desire (Carson’s, my own) to sink further into the memory of the departed lover and remain there . On the cusp of dark and dawn, I would lie in my narrow bed and try to memorize the whole thirty-eight-page poem. I never got very far, but certain lines snagged in my mind. The moments that really cut were where the language is plainest, most painful: “His name was Law.”

The name of the man in Carson’s poem puzzled me every time I read it. I wondered, always, what I was supposed to take from this solemn pun. Was “Law” his real name? Is it a name at all, or is it a talisman, perhaps a command? I knew I could seek out answers or speculations from other readers, or perhaps even by emailing or speaking with the writer, as other scholars of contemporary literature might. But I didn’t then and still don’t want to. I prefer to stay alone with this poem.

And so I sank and took “The Glass Essay” down with me, not yet understanding that it had much more to teach me than the loss of love.

This yearning for a lost lover named Law raises a question: Is to be loveless to be lawless? If Law equals love, then is love—when requited, respected—the thing that keeps us in line, restrained and civil? Certainly, both loss and longing are states of emergency, outside the law. Perhaps to be with Law is to be governed by him, or by desire for him. Or is it the opposite? One brief moment in the poem seems like it might offer an answer, but then flatly refuses to:

Well, there are different definitions of Liberty. Love is freedom, Law was fond of saying. I took this to be more a wish than a thought

and changed the subject.

The man who fractured my heart that summer, and cleanly broke it later on, was also fond of speculating about love and freedom. For someone who talked and wrote a lot to friends and strangers, he didn’t put much stake in the verbal as a mode of emotional honesty. Looking back, I see now that he thought love was the freedom not to explain yourself, a millennial version of “Love is never having to say you’re sorry.” Love, to him, was something like a complete freedom of self-expression so expansive and natural it didn’t have to be contained in words but could instead be communicated purely through gaze, or touch, or atmospheric resonance. I believe in gazes and touches and atmospheres, but I cannot—and would never—forsake my belief in words. I am most free and real when jostling around restlessly in the human laboratory of dialogue.

But dialogue requires someone who will talk back: that is its fundamental rule. It is proof of the lawlessness of love that I could love him when we didn’t even agree that this rule existed.

his name was luck.

Luck because I met him at a time when I was stoutly resisting the temptation to declare myself terminally unlucky in love. I did not want to let myself off the hook like that, did not want to make lame cosmic excuses for my loneliness with abstractions like fate or doom. But then I met him, and knew that luck was real, because he just appeared one day, out of the ether of a dating app. We found that we craved the same foods, laughed at the same small things, liked the same smells and colors. It was plain good fortune to have met. In fact, it was the first major stroke of fortune I’d had since I’d gotten my teaching job, a fancy position at a prestigious university in which I had been flailing—unfit and unwell, rather than unlucky—for several years. And now here was Luck, another outwardly successful person who had his own share of doubts and regrets, and empathized with my feeling of unfitness and unease. We were both sad, lucky people who felt that our luck was unearned, a problem that is understandably very annoying to most. What luck to have found each other!

When Luck left me that June, I gave in to the mortifying feeling that I was loveless, outside the laws of normal life. The months in England were a mourning time, I told myself with false confidence. When I went home in the fall, it would be over—not better, just over . And so I sank and took “The Glass Essay” down with me, not yet understanding that it had much more to teach me than the loss of love.

for most of my life , the only thing I could call myself with any certainty was a reader. A reader of books and, I realized somewhat late, a reader of people. Many of us who were lonely children see ourselves this way. In elementary school I saved my quarters for slim Bantam paperbacks, read under the covers, and lived almost wholly in my imagination—the whole starter kit of clichés that compose the shy, bookish child.

I realized early that the idea of age appropriateness in books was a sham, and for years I read anything that captured my imagination. Even in college, I rarely did the assigned reading; instead, I wound my way through an idiosyncratic personal canon. I was always reading the wrong thing at the wrong time, it seemed—and often in the wrong place. (I got fired from a library job for getting caught reading a fantasy novel in a study carrel when I was supposed to be shelving books.) But these choices were right to me . Finding the right books to love felt as natural and unplanned as finding the right people to love.

In graduate school, though, there suddenly seemed to be consequences for reading indiscriminately. My reading, and my writing about reading, were often considered irresponsible, by which my professors and peers meant that they were undertheorized, uninformed, and unresearched. This was a brutal lesson that I came to appreciate. I developed parameters of thought and rigor that shaped how I read, learning to channel even the most randomly stumbled-upon texts into my dissertation’s overarching argument. And so, I became accustomed to (and even dependent upon) a kind of disciplined liberty. I accepted that while objectivity was impossible, subjectivity was perhaps avoidable. I became a professional reader.

That summer abroad, I hadn’t intended to read “The Glass Essay,” as I’d never considered myself a responsible reader of Anne Carson. Since I was not a classicist, and her work is suffused with Classical references and texts, I felt I would not have permission until I learned enough about the ancient poets to read her properly— and so, realistically, never. But a couplet from “The Glass Essay” I had seen quoted in a friend’s dissertation stuck in my mind:

When Law left I felt so bad I thought I would die. This is not uncommon.

When Luck left me, these lines resurfaced. That’s it, I thought. That is love. The blank honesty of the couplet made me need Carson; I had to give in to her.

In Oxford, I was supposed to be writing the scholarly book I never ended up finishing; instead, I summoned up a short stack of Carson from the depths of the Bodleian. Slim books with great, epic names: Glass, Irony, and God ; Eros the Bittersweet ; Economy of the Unlost. I encountered “The Glass Essay” upon opening the first of these. For a few days it was just something I was muddling through, a poem I was still in the midst of deciphering. But by the end of that week I had read it and annotated it and read it again, and I still felt a need for it. I could not read anything else until I had satisfied that need. “The Glass Essay” stood in the way of any other text. That’s how it became part of my daily schedule: run, shower, coffee, read “The Glass Essay,” work. On the weekends, when the reading room was closed and LIBIDINAL COMMUNISM inaccessible, I’d change it up a little: read “The Glass Essay” upon waking, run, coffee, shower, work. As someone who thinks mostly about novels, I am shy around poetry; I feel often as though it is reading me more than I am reading it. After years of feeling that way, it was strange to wake up and read a poem every day, and to feel I had grown intimate with it , tender with its idiosyncrasies of form and rhythm. For four or five weeks this went on, the poem becoming as falsely natural as a piercing, a foreign body fitted snugly into the internal and external material of my life.

To make clear the strangeness of this, I must first admit to being a compulsive failed self-improver. My parents hope to attain eternal life through dietary restriction; trained from childhood to respect other people’s regimens, I’ve always admired those who can develop systems of personal organization and live consistently within them. Perhaps in reaction to the strictness of my childhood, I am not one of those people. At the beginning of every school year, I make detailed schedules for days of teaching, days of writing, days of reading, but after a week or two, everything falls apart, and the only plans I can follow are my lesson plans. I am addicted to working and thinking as the spirit moves me, in the maddening way that only the unattached, often depressive person can get away with: seventy-two-hour writing benders, followed by days or weeks of melancholic collapse; periods of mental slog punctuated by a sudden sprint through five or six books without breaks for food or movement. I recognize the decadence of this lifestyle. In the brief neutral moments between these altered states I find it extremely embarrassing and self-indulgent. Yet no matter how many rules I attempt to impose upon myself, the only predictable cycle I maintain is the endless loop of plans made, plans broken, self-flagellation.

So the Carson program came as a real surprise. The closest experience I’d had to it were the summer days, governed by animal schedules, that I’d spent working on farms on and off throughout my life. In fact, there was something reassuringly animal-like about the predetermined hours of that month, as though the poem were the morning scoop of grain I needed to ruminate on to give me enough energy to move through the day. The poem was necessary sustenance.

in staring at carson’s words day after day, I found myself doing something I’d been trained in graduate school not to do: I started to see myself reflected in them. I fell deeply and unquestioningly into identification with the speaker, seeking out similarities, imagining that we felt the same emotions and sensations. It was like falling in love.

The line “Mother and I are chewing lettuce carefully” brought back the diet-ruled dinners of my childhood, my parents and me silently chewing cold leaves and roots with grim concentration. The speaker doesn’t like to lie late in bed in the mornings, and neither do I. (Her: “Law did. / My mother does.” Me: Luck didn’t, either.) Soon I even felt a tug of fond familiarity reading about things that I don’t do or feel. Standing at the open refrigerator, the speaker says,

White foods taste best to me

and I prefer to eat alone. I don’t know why.

I don’t feel any particular way about white foods, and I prefer to eat in company. But rereading those lines, I was momentarily certain that I too felt as the speaker did and had to remind myself that this was not the case. These tiny, domestic sympathies, embedded in a poem that deals with the very biggest questions—What is love? What is God? What is art, who dares attempt it, and at what cost? What are mother and father and self?—folded me into the text with a bodily immediacy, rather than keeping me at the cool distance of scholarly reading.

Looking back, I wonder if cultivating intimacy with the text in this way was a self-soothing mechanism. I don’t think it was. Processing the breakup through this act of rereading, redoubling, and remembering revolved around the neutral cruelty of repetition. As Carson writes,

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days. It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up blue and green lozenges of April heat a year ago in another country.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape…

After you walk away from a last good-bye, the terrain of everyday life is suddenly overlaid with the haunted geography of an entire relationship. Every space is layered with the fine sediment of recollection. Any time you trip and reach out for balance, your hand might accidentally slip “down // into time” and dredge up something beautiful or awful from those years or months or weeks past.

Did he really want to see me, or did he simply want to be allowed to see something, to be granted the pleasure of mere access?

The self, too, is multiplied, and might cross itself if you are not careful. As time slides and aligns and blurs, so too does Carson’s speaker feel her present self slip into a past self of the hot last April, inhabiting simultaneously a then-“she,” trapped in memory, and a now-“I,” writing in the present. Typing these lines, even now I feel my heartbeat double for a moment with syncopated desire. I feel the chilly presence of my own ghostly double from this time last year; she is sitting at this same desk, awaiting Luck’s response to a long email of supplication, nauseated by the mingling of hope and exhaustion.

The looped rereading of “The Glass Essay” made everything feel like the present, rather than the past. All the moments with Luck were there at once, and all the selves that I had been in relation to him, too. The self reading Carson in the library; the self lying on my floor a few weeks earlier, asking him what he thought love was; the self dashing around cooking dinner with him in his tiny kitchen. Il punto a cui tutti li tempi son presenti, to crib Dante’s mystical phrase: “the point when all the times are present.” The ritualized rereading of “The Glass Essay” summoned all these times and held them in shimmering alignment, just as Carson’s speaker feels moments overlapping in the poem. I wonder if a part of me still believed, childishly, that the repeated incantation of a name or a phrase is a powerful summoning spell—you know, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,” “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.” (Luck, Luck, Luck.) Could the repeated reading of a poem bring its words into my actual life in a consequential way? In those weeks, I did feel something uncanny was coming over me and Oxford, which was bleached unfamiliar shades of straw and gold by the drought. I couldn’t tell if this was an effect of the text or of my compulsive rereading of it.

Of course, Carson’s poem enacts a similar question: it is itself a lyric essay on rereading Emily Brontë, and how this rereading leads the speaker to view the conditions of her life differently.

When it opens, the speaker has retreated to her mother’s house in the remote North to convalesce from the loss of Law. She takes with her:

…a lot of books—

some for my mother, some for me including The Collected Works Of Emily Brontë . This is my favourite author.

We find “Three silent women at the kitchen table”: Carson, her mother, and Emily, communicating blurrily as through an “atmosphere of glass.” The odd presence of Emily at that kitchen table, quietly lurking inside her book, made me think about the presence of Anne Carson in my own day-to-day activities, an Anne Carson I began to half-imagine as embodied rather than em- booked . Anne Carson jogging lightly beside me in the park, Anne Carson absent-mindedly humming behind me in the coffee queue, Anne Carson sitting opposite me in the library, leaning back coolly in her chair like a rebel in a high school movie, watching me read her poem for the thirteenth or twenty-third time.

This strange feeling of possession was itself mimetic of the poem. For just as I felt myself inhabiting Carson’s “I,” so does Carson’s speaker feel herself doubling her “favourite author.” Yet Emily, writes Carson, is also

…my main fear, which I mean to confront. Whenever I visit my mother I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë,

my lonely life around me like a moor, my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation that dies when I come in the kitchen door.

All the things I was warned away from as a professional student of literature—not to confuse the poet with the speaker, not to get mired in biography, not to be fooled by the cheap lure of identification—went out the window as this possession overcame us. We were three silent women, moving through the pages of books and years. Carson peered into Brontë’s poems as I peered into her own poem, looking for—something.

It was never clear what Emily herself was looking for. Such is the mystery of her strange life and her strange work. In her 1850 preface to Wuthering Heights, Emily’s sister Charlotte writes with the awed fascination of a villager peering into the darkness of an anchorite’s cell. Emily, in Carson’s quotation of the preface, “was not a person of demonstrative character.” Indeed, even “those nearest and dearest to her” could not “with impunity, intrude unlicensed” into the recesses of her mind. Even Charlotte expresses a fearful respect for the secrecy of those alarming “recesses”: the deep, secret self that her sister guarded so sternly. Emily is always one more locked door away from both those who loved her in life and those who love her work. To get closest to her work is to accept that you will never see to the bottom of those recesses. Charlotte recognizes this, and Carson does too.

luck was always trying to plumb my depths, in a manner I found both sweet and offensive. He always wanted more and wouldn’t believe me when I said I’d told him everything. When eventually he saw that I really had given him everything I knew about myself, he found the offering wanting. A few weeks into our relationship, I began to experience the well-intentioned ferocity of his desire to understand me better than I understood myself. He wasn’t really a drinker, but he poured us both a scotch and alternatingly interrogated and flirted with me. I was attracted and confused. Here was someone who wanted to know more about me, but his playful manner of asking very serious questions made his desire seem like part of a game. Did he really want to see me, or did he simply want to be allowed to see something , to be granted the pleasure of mere access?

The idea of seeing, really seeing, was more important to him than it was to anyone I’d ever known. On our second or third date, he casually told me that he was face-blind—a condition I’d never heard of. He was, as he said, “bad at faces.” This was a self-deprecating understatement. Over the next few weeks, he told me more about his particular condition. It would take him, he estimated, twenty or thirty meetings with someone to be able to recognize that person’s face. If I put my hair up or let it down, took my glasses off or put them on, he suddenly saw me as a stranger. This explained, I thought, the way he’d pause and examine my face every time we met, a smile playing around his lips, looking for the person he was coming to know. The longer we were together, the more his face-blindness confused me: How much did he recognize me? How much did it matter if he didn’t or couldn’t ever? I came to terms with this, telling myself that at the very least, I would always know if he found me attractive. My fear was that one day, out of the blue, he wouldn’t. It worried me—and in some way I’ll never understand, I’m sure it worried him too.

Thinking about him now, I have to stop myself from narrative reduction, the cruelest thing I could do to a person I still care about. Luck is not just a character in my story; he has his own. It’s too easy to draw a neat, simplistic parallel: Luck felt he never really recognized me emotionally because his brain actually couldn’t recognize me physically. That’s not it, though. Looking back, I begin to understand that he was also peering into me in the hope that he would find a mirror that could show him his truest self, that would instructively reveal what he looked like in love. I don’t say this with resentment but rather with what remains of love. I wonder how many relationships between mindfully, often proudly, self-reflective people are like this—how often do we look into our partners in order to see ourselves more clearly? Another kind of compulsive rereading, you might say. To look into the person you’re with over and over again, telling yourself that you’re trying to comprehend them more fully, can simply be a means of understanding your own reading self. This self that reads other people is not exactly the same as the self that might read a poem—but it is not entirely different. It took me a long time to realize that I did not want to be a mirror to reflect Luck or a text to enable his readings. I grew tired of being peered at and tired of trying to see through the thick, impenetrable glass of his own surface.

the metaphor is so obvious I barely need to articulate it. Luck peered into me to see himself, then I peered into Carson to see myself, as she peered into Brontë in turn—a nested series of readings and rereadings in the search for newer, deeper meanings. I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time; my immersion in Carson’s poem was so total that I couldn’t take even a step back. I only started to perceive these twinned phenomena somewhere around week three of the Carson regimen.

For Carson, the intense peering activates a powerful, frightening mode of self-reflection, wherein she seems to see right through the illusory exterior of emotion into somewhere more profound and, eventually, more generative. She supplements her reading with periods of rhapsodic meditation, in which a series of twelve female “Nudes” appears to her, visions that she understands to be “a nude glimpse of [her] lone soul, / not the complex mysteries of love and hate.” The Nudes are primitively symbolic, tarot-like, their imagery at once hotly interior and coldly objectified. They are violent: a woman’s body in agony, flesh ripped away, or pierced by thorns, or stitched by a giant silver needle. They infiltrate me as profoundly as the poem’s images of passion. They summon up familiar visions I’d long held at bay: flashbacks to fantasies of my body rendered down, sliced or melted away, accompanied by the familiar scent of self-harm’s alchemical compound of desire and terror.

The poem hurt me and made me think about the nature of that pain after I’d felt it over and over again.

Here, though, my identification with Carson begins to unravel and lift away. The instant that I’ve followed her into the madness of these barest visions of her inner self and my own, she turns back to Brontë’s complex visions, which seem at once to face inward and outward, a mobile vantage from which she does not peer but rather radiates. In Emily’s poetry (Carson writes), she “had a relationship…with someone she calls Thou,” who may be God or Death, or something undefined. Emily, in her apparent isolation, seems to have had a clearer understanding than I of how to relate to the other, even if her other is a force, not a person. It seems strange to turn for advice on love to Emily Brontë, a woman who was “unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out,” and according to her biographers led a “sad, stunted life…Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment / and despair.” Yet it is through Brontë that Carson—and through Carson, I—begin to really ask the fundamental questions: How are we to look at the loved one, and how are we to look at ourselves? Weird Emily, communing intermittently with Thou, might offer some kind of better answer than what I’d gleaned from human relationships for how to be held closely yet at a distance, in some state of perpetual transit between the “inside outside” and the “outside inside.” “Thou and Emily influence one another in the darkness,” writes Carson, “playing near and far at once.” Something about this seeming paradox of location, near and far, inside and outside, and the way that Emily flits between the two, seems to hold some promise of escaping the mere self. Her word for this is “whaching”:

Whacher, Emily’s habitual spelling of this word, has caused confusion.

Whacher is what she was. She whached God and humans and moor wind and open night. She whached eyes, stars, inside, outside, actual weather.

She whached the bars of time, which broke. She whached the poor core of the world, wide open.

Whaching is not simply watching; while she whached things we can all observe, like “humans” and “actual weather,” she also whached those things that cannot be seen or known, like “God” and “the poor core of the world.” Whaching somehow allows her to be at once inside and outside of herself; by whaching, Emily breaks “the bars of time” and seems to exist outside its prison. Somehow, whaching is less an action than a state of being:

To be a Whacher is not a choice. There is nowhere to get away from it…

To be a Whacher is not in itself sad or happy.

To whach, it seems, is a calling. If Emily is a Whacher, then so too is Carson by the end of the poem—but only after she stops trying so hard to watch, to “peer and glance,” seeking symbolic meaning or resolution, seeking to solve the problem of herself with and without Law. After the period of rereading Brontë, staring into herself, and seeing the Nudes, the whole thing simply stops:

I stopped watching. I forgot about Nudes. I lived my life,

which felt like a switched-off TV. Something had gone through me and out and I could not own it.

At first, this moment feels deflating, emptied of the exhilaration of what she earlier calls her “spiritual melodrama” and intense feeling. But then something amazing happens. When the speaker, and the reader, least expect it, the poem ends with a final vision, a thirteenth Nude. Though it resembles the first Nude—the woman standing naked and bloody on a hill, strips of flesh flayed by the wind—this figure is not in pain. It stands, neutral and unflinching,

…a human body

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones. And there was no pain. The wind

was cleansing the bones. They stood forth silver and necessary. It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all. It walked out of the light.

This Nude is not flesh, but bone: shining, bright bone, “silver and necessary,” somehow stripped of individual identity but not of communal feeling. This Nude, I think, is somewhere between “I” and “Thou,” between body and what we might call spirit, at once physical and mystical, “the body of us all.”

On one of the late Carson days, maybe Tuesday or Wednesday of the fourth week, this moment gave me a new shock. I did not know what it meant; I think I still do not understand it. But it led me to consider my own spiritual melodrama, and my ways of peering and rereading. All that bloody revealing, that squinting and seeking, hadn’t gotten down to the bones of the situation. It didn’t open up the poor core of my world or any other; it only abandoned me in the foggy region between past and present, my vision clouded by layers of feeling. Suddenly, these methods of reading were clearly insufficient. I was not whaching right, and I knew it. But I was learning.

Learning to whach meant getting both closer and farther away from my deep identification with the poem’s speaker. It meant realizing that my reflection was not the thing to look for, despite the shining surfaces of the poem. The closer I got to the poem as a whole, the farther I got from myself; the farther I got from the self, the more clearly could I see it. The poem hurt me and made me think about the nature of that pain after I’d felt it over and over again. It taught me a lesson in how to slip, like Emily, outside the prison of the self-in-time to see that self from the inside and the outside simultaneously. To whach.

Thinking of what it means to whach, I wonder if it is some form of the discipline I was trained in, which scholars call criticism, and which I am tempted now just to call “reading.” Perhaps not reading as it is usually performed by so-called professional readers (critics, teachers, writers), but reading as it might be wholly integrated into lived experience. “The Glass Essay” is not just a breakup poem that demands to be read as a critical essay, or a critical essay that demands to be read as a breakup poem; it is somehow neither and both of these at once. Carson learns to whach from Brontë, and in so doing, learns finally to whach herself. A critical stance, the poem suggests, is needed to read and reread the most intimate feelings in ourselves and in others. This kind of reading is the necessary approach to personal experience, an imperative that demands a reinvention, or perhaps a radically earnest reaffirmation, of criticism’s scholarly intent.

I read “The Glass Essay” differently now. In that month of rereading, I was peering so intently at it for my own reflection, trying to scry my own feelings, the resolution of my own sadness. But now that those feelings are gone, I can look at the poem and the breakup through the transparent pane of that old reading, which both keeps me outside that old reading self and lets me see her from the inside, clearly. I can see her, and the poem, and the loss of Luck more lucidly than before because I am not looking for anything anymore. I am not looking for myself in Carson’s reading of Brontë, or in Carson’s Nudes, or in Carson’s breakup story. I stand outside it now, whaching, but no longer reflected, no longer reflecting.

Rachel Cusk

Renaissance women, fady joudah, you might also like, short talks, the subject of pain, a new direction in american poetry, new perspectives, enduring writing..

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Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist

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The scholar is transparent and accountable, the poet inward and errant: anyone who reads Anne Carson has to suspend many such separations of power. The first major critical study of her work, Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist makes the case for the acclaimed poet, classicist, and translator as a remarkable experimental scholar and reader, who rehearses scholarly methods while slipping their constraints of form and emotion. Carson’s attention to sources, ancient and modern, textual or visual, is one of few constants across almost four decades of her published writing, whose uncertain claims on discipline and genre are claimed here as a certain interpretive style. The book follows Carson’s readings through variations in form—from early academic prose and poem-essays to creative adaptations and works for performance—to come to grips with what Coles calls Carson’s transparency: not her easiness or literalism, but a taste for the exposure of her presence, working process, and intent. Carson’s portraits of mediation perform her interventions for the reader, yet they play compellingly with a desire to cut mediation, argument, even authorship, out of the picture; with commitments to poetic economy, constrained writing, chance, impersonation, imitation, and the performative. Coles situates Carson in a vibrant contemporary conversation around the essay, scholar-poets, and post-critical form, where creation transacts critique, and where roles and prerogatives are reset. Reading Carson as a reader, the book argues, is the most pressing way of reading her now .

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The Glass Essay

Anne carson.

First published January 1, 1995

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Anne carson , the art of poetry no. 88, issue 171, fall 2004.

Anne Carson and I first met in 1988 at a writers’ workshop in Canada, and have been reading each other’s work ever since. The interview that follows is a mix of our usual conversation and discussion about topics that preoccupy Carson’s work—mysticism, antiquity, obsession, desire.

Carson was born on June 21, 1950, in Toronto, the second and final child of Margaret and Robert Carson. Her mother was a housewife; her father worked for the Toronto Dominion Bank. During her childhood, the family moved about from bank to bank in small Ontario towns like Stoney Creek, Port Hope, Timmins.

In the 1970s Carson studied classics at the University of Toronto and then ancient Greek with the renowned classical scholar Kenneth Dover at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1981, she returned to the University of Toronto to write a Ph.D. dissertation on Sappho, which later became  Eros the Bittersweet — a brief, dense treatise on lack’s centrality to desire. Today, Carson lives in Ann Arbor, where she teaches classics and comparative literature at the University of Michigan.

Although she has always been reluctant to call herself a poet, Carson has been writing some heretic form of poetry almost all her life. Her work is insistent and groundbreaking, a blend of genres and styles that for years failed to attract notice. In the late eighties, a few literary magazines in the United States began to publish her work. Canadian venues were considerably less welcoming, and it was not until Carson was forty-two that a small Canadian pub- lisher, Brick Books, published her first book of poems,  Short Talks. 

By the mid-nineties, Carson was no longer trying to find publishers; rather, publishers were clamoring to find her. In short order, three collections of poems and essays appeared— Plainwater: Essays and Poetry  (1995);  Glass, Irony and God  (1995);  Men in the Off Hours  (2000)—as well as a verse novel,  Autobiography of Red  (1998), which seamlessly blends Greek myth, homosexuality, and small-town Ontario life. Two ostensibly academic books followed:  Economy of the Unlost  and her translation of Sappho’s poetry,  If Not, Winter,  both in 2002.

Awards and accolades came tumbling in: a Guggenheim Fellowship (1995); a Lannan Award (1996); the Pushcart Prize (1997); a MacArthur Fellowship (2000); and the Griffin Prize for Poetry (2001). In 2002 Carson became the first woman to receive England’s T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for  The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. 

For the past several years, Carson has been working on a spoken-word opera about three women mystics—Aphrodite, the fourteenth-century French heretic Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil. Next year, Random House will publish  Decreation —the eponymously titled opera—alongside new poems and essays.

We started the following interview just after Christmas in 2002. Exhausted by the joyous demands of the season, Carson stretched out on an orange velveteen sofa and we talked—fortified by cups of oolong tea—for several hours.

— Will Aitken 

INTERVIEWER

I want to start with your poem “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions.” There’s a line in there that stopped me right in the middle: “My personal poetry is a failure.” It made me wonder two things: What do you call your personal poetry? And do you really feel it’s a failure or is that just the poem’s persona talking?

Well, I think there are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don’t say what I want them to say. And that’s true of the persona in the poem, but it’s also true of me as me.

When you look back on “The Glass Essay,” for example, do you consider it a personal poem? Do you see it as a failure?

I see it as a messing around on an upper level with things that I wanted to make sense of at a deeper level. I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts—to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life. But when I wrote “The Glass Essay,” I also wanted to do something that I would call understanding what life feels like, and I don’t believe I did.

I also don’t know what it would be to do that, but if you read Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, there’s a fragrance of understanding you come away with—this smell in your head of having gone through something that you understood with the people in the story. When I think about my writing, I don’t feel that.

Is that because it’s still part of your ongoing personal experience?

Well, that’s possible. But how can one ever judge those things?

Or that it might be a failure to you, but a success for everybody else who picks it up?

I think so, because this capturing of the surface of emotional fact is useful for other people in that it jolts them into thinking, into doing their own act of understanding. But I still don’t think I finished the thinking.

There’s another line in “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions”—“I want to be unbearable”—that strikes me as exact and expressive of you as a writer.

I remember that sentence driving at me in the dark like a glacier. I felt like a ship going toward the South Pole and then all of a sudden a glacier comes zooming out of the dark, and I just took it down. I appreciate that it’s accurate of what I both have and choose to have as my effect on people. I don’t know exactly why that’s the case.

You once said you meant  unbearable  in a metaphysical sense.

Well, yes, it couldn’t be physical, could it? Unless I went around hammering people.

There are those days.

With sharp objects. It’s true, that’s why I go to boxing class, to learn those skills. But that’s just, of course, shadowboxing, as they say.

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Suggested Reading

“The seat to my left was empty. It was to remain empty all evening.”

Dinner Parties

The art of fiction no. 178.

In 1985, after seventeen New York publishers had rejected  City of Glass , the lead novella in The New York Trilogy, it was published by Sun and Moon Press in San Francisco. The other two novellas,  Ghosts  and  The Locked Room , came out the next year. Paul Auster was thirty-eight. Although he wrote reviews and translations regularly and his prose poem  White Spaces had been published in 1980, the trilogy marked the true start of his literary career.

   Auster has written about those prepublication years in  Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure  (1997). He studied at Columbia University in the late sixties, then worked for a few months on an oil tanker before moving to Paris where he eked out a living as a translator. He started a little magazine,  Little Hand , and an independent publishing house of the same name with his first wife, the writer Lydia Davis. In 1972 his first book, a collection of translations titled  A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems , was published. He returned to New York City in 1974 and, among other ventures, tried to sell a baseball card game he had invented. In 1982, Auster published his first prose book,  The Invention of Solitude , a memoir and meditation on fatherhood that he started writing shortly after his father’s death.

   Auster has published a book almost annually since the trilogy: In 1987 the novel  In the Country of Last Things  appeared. His other novels include  Moon Palace  (1989),  The Music of Chance  (1990),  Leviathan  (1992), and  The Book of Illusions  (2002). Auster was made a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1991 (he was elevated to an officer in 1997).

   The range of Auster’s work is remarkable—novels, essays, translations, poems, plays, songs, and collaborations with artists (including Sophie Calle and Sam Messer). He has also written three screenplays:  Smoke  (1995),  Blue in the Face  (1995), and  Lulu on the Bridge (1998), which he directed as well.  Oracle Night , his ninth novel, will be published later this year.

   The following conversation started last fall with a live interview at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York City. The interview was completed one afternoon this summer at Auster’s home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt. A gracious host, he apologized for the workers who were installing central air conditioning in their nineteenth-century brownstone, then gave a brief tour: The living room is decorated with paintings by his friends Sam Messer and David Reed. In their front hall, there is a collection of family photographs. Bookshelves line the walls of his office on the ground floor. And, of course, on his desk the famous typewriter.

Let’s start by talking about the way you work. About how you write.

PAUL AUSTER

I’ve always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil—especially for corrections. If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

And you write in notebooks. Not legal pads or loose sheets of paper.

Yes, always in notebooks. And I have a particular fetish for notebooks with quadrille lines—the little squares.

But what about the famous Olympia typewriter? We know quite a bit about that machine—last year you published a wonderful book with the painter Sam Messer,  The Story of My Typewriter .

I’ve owned that typewriter since 1974—more than half my life now. I bought it second-hand from a college friend and at this point it must be about forty years old. It’s a relic from another age, but it’s still in good condition. It’s never broken down. All I have to do is change ribbons every once in a while. But I’m living in fear that a day will come when there won’t be any ribbons left to buy—and I’ll have to go digital and join the twenty-first century.

A great Paul Auster story. The day when you go out to buy that last ribbon.

I’ve made some preparations. I’ve stocked up. I think I have about sixty or seventy ribbons in my room. I’ll probably stick with that typewriter till the end, although I’ve been sorely tempted to give it up at times. It’s cumbersome and inconvenient, but it also protects me against laziness.

Because the typewriter forces me to start all over again once I’m finished. With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can’t get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It’s an incredibly tedious process. You’ve finished your book, and now you have to spend several weeks engaged in the purely mechanical job of transcribing what you’ve already written. It’s bad for your neck, bad for your back, and even if you can type twenty or thirty pages a day, the finished pages pile up with excruciating slowness. That’s the moment when I always wish I’d switched to a computer, and yet every time I push myself through this final stage of a book, I wind up discovering how essential it is. Typing allows me to experience the book in a new way, to plunge into the flow of the narrative and feel how it functions as a whole. I call it “reading with my fingers,” and it’s amazing how many errors your fingers will find that your eyes never noticed. Repetitions, awkward constructions, choppy rhythms. It never fails. I think I’m finished with the book and then I begin to type it up and I realize there’s more work to be done.

Let’s go back to the notebooks for a minute. Quinn, in  City of Glass , records his observations in a red notebook. Anna Blume, the narrator of  In the Country of Last Things , composes her letter in a blue notebook. In  Mr. Vertigo , Walt writes his autobiography in thirteen hardbound school composition books. And Willy G. Christmas, the demented hero of  Timbuktu , has lugged his entire life’s work to Baltimore to give to his high-school English teacher before he dies: seventy-four notebooks of “poems, stories, essays, diary entries, epigrams, autobiographical musings, and the first eighteen-hundred lines of an epic-in-progress,  Vagabond Days .” Notebooks also figure in your most recent novels,  The Book of Illusions  and  Oracle Night . To say nothing of your collection of true stories,  The Red Notebook . What are we to make of this?

I suppose I think of the notebook as a house for words, as a secret place for thought and self-examination. I’m not just interested in the results of writing, but in the process, the act of putting words on a page. Don’t ask me why. It might have something to do with an early confusion on my part, an ignorance about the nature of fiction. As a young person, I would always ask myself, Where are the words coming from? Who’s saying this? The third-person narrative voice in the traditional novel is a strange device. We’re used to it now, we accept it, we don’t question it anymore. But when you stop and think about it, there’s an eerie, disembodied quality to that voice. It seems to come from nowhere and I found that disturbing. I was always drawn to books that doubled back on themselves, that brought you into the world of the book, even as the book was taking you into the world. The manuscript as hero, so to speak.  Wuthering Heights  is that kind of novel.  The Scarlet Letter  is another. The frames are fictitious, of course, but they give a groundedness and credibility to the stories that other novels didn’t have for me. They posit the work as an illusion—which more traditional forms of narrative don’t—and once you accept the “unreality” of the enterprise, it paradoxically enhances the truth of the story. The words aren’t written in stone by an invisible author-god. They represent the efforts of a flesh-and-blood human being and this is very compelling. The reader becomes a participant in the unfolding of the story—not just a detached observer.

From the Archive, Issue 167

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Anne Carson

Discover the work and career of the canadian poet and essayist granted the 2020 princess of asturias award for literature..

By Fundación Princesa de Asturias

Fundación Princesa de Asturias

Anne Carson, 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature by Beowulf Sheehan Fundación Princesa de Asturias

Anne Carson (Toronto, Canada, 21st June 1950) is a professor of Classical and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, as well as a renowned poet, essayist and translator. A bilingual edition of Sappho’s poems which she found in a bookstore changed her life forever: “The vision of the two juxtaposed pages, one of them an impenetrable text, but of great visual beauty, captivated me and I bought the book.”

Anne Carson, 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature 2020 by Einar Fallur Ingolfsson Fundación Princesa de Asturias

A specialist in classical culture and languages and in comparative literature, anthropology, history and advertising, in the opinion of critics Carson is one of the most exquisite and erudite writers of contemporary literature, as well as the author of a hypnotic body of work, in which she fuses styles, references and forms, creating a hybrid of Greco-Latin, medieval and contemporary poetics.

Anne Carson, 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature (2018-10-17) by Paulo Slachevsky Fundación Princesa de Asturias

For her, translation and creation are synonymous terms. She has stated “If I knew what poetry was, I wouldn’t have to write. It’s something I seek to tempt in the dark” and also that “you do what you have to in order to write about what you want to write”. She has thus created an exquisite world, a collage between poetry, dissertation, essay and drama, with contributions sometimes even from opera.

Anne Carson Bibliography, 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature Fundación Princesa de Asturias

In her first book, Eros the Bittersweet , Carson already meditated on the nature of romantic love and erotic desire using prose fragments that intersect with the verses. Her most admired poets include Homer, Thomas Hardy and the English poetess Stevie Smith, whom she describes as “sublime”, and she considers Virginia Woolf the most important figure in the history of literature.

At the age of 42, she published Short Talks (1992), a work that was followed by the works Plainwater (1995); The Glass Essay (1995); her well-known work Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998); Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Ceos with Paul Celan (1999); Men in the Off Hours (2000), a collection of epitaphs, love poems, verse essays and drafts of scripts; The Beauty of the Husband (2001); If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002); Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005); Nox (2010); Antigonick (2012); Red Doc> [sic] (2013) and Float (2016).

Recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (USA, 1996), the Pushcart Prize for Poetry (USA, 1997), the T. S. Eliot Prize (UK, 2001), the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation (USA, 2010) and the Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada, 2014), Anne Carson was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Toronto and has been awarded both Guggenheim (1998) and MacArthur (2000) Fellowships.

Anne Carson, 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature (2020-06-18) Fundación Princesa de Asturias

Reading of the minutes of the jury for the 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature.

© Fundación Princesa de Asturias Images: © Beowulf Sheehan © Einar Fallur Ingolfsson "Lectura de Anne Carson, Red Doc" by pslachevsky is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Texts: Fundación Princesa de Asturias Translation: Paul Barnes www.fpa.es [email protected]

Princess of Asturias Foundation

Spanish health workers on the front line against covid-19, the guadalajara international book fair and the hay festival of literature & arts, dani rodrik, ennio morricone and john williams, gavi, the vaccine alliance, carlos sainz cenamor, yves meyer, ingrid daubechies, terence tao and emmanuel candès.

The Glass Essay

27 pages • 54 minutes read

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Form and Meter

“The Glass Essay” is written in free verse , contrasting sharply with the poems of Emily Bronte, which have a structured rhyme scheme and meter .  Carson varies the use of syllables by line. For example, line 790 contains almost 20 syllables, while line 803 contains six syllables. Tercets (three-line stanzas) dominate the structure of the poem, however, Carson occasionally adds a line and includes a quatrain (a four-line stanza). The relatively orderly stanzas juxtapose the speaker’s emotional disarray and her tendency to jump from topic to topic, from self to Emily, from inner conversation to dialogues with her mother. The relatively predictable structure of the stanzas adds stability while the speaker moves from her mother’s kitchen, to moments in her past, to the life and literature of Emily.

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By Anne Carson

Autobiography Of Red

Anne Carson

Red Doc>

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Glass, Irony and God (New Directions Paperbook) Paperback – November 17, 1995

Purchase options and add-ons.

Anne Carson's poetry―characterized by various reviewers as "short talks," "essays," or "verse narratives"―combines the confessional and the critical in a voice all her own.

• Print length 142 pages
• Language English
• Publisher New Directions
• Publication date November 17, 1995
• Dimensions 5.2 x 0.5 x 8.1 inches
• ISBN-10 9780811213028
• ISBN-13 978-0811213028
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0811213021
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Directions; Later Printing Used edition (November 17, 1995)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 142 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780811213028
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0811213028
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 0.013 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.5 x 8.1 inches
• #204 in American Poetry (Books)

About the author

Anne carson.

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur “Genius” Award.

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