In high school, a Latin instructor introduced Carson to the world and language of Ancient Greece and tutored her privately. Enrolling at St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, she left twice—at the end of her first and second years. Carson, disconcerted by curricular constraints, retired to the world of graphic arts for a short time. She did eventually return to the University of Toronto where she completed her B.A. in 1974, her M.A. in 1975, and her Ph.D. in 1981. She also spent a year studying Greek metrics and Greek textual criticism at the University of St Andrews.
Career
A professor of the classics, with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art, Carson blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She is influenced by Ancient Greek literature, Sappho, Simone Weil, Homer, Virginia Woolf, Emily Brontë, and Thucydides. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published twenty books as of 2016, most of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. Carson was an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for Fall 2007. The Classic Stage Company, a New York–based theatre company, produced three of Carson's translations: Aeschylus' Agamemnon; Sophocles' Electra; and Euripides' Orestes, in repertory, in the 2008/2009 season. From 2010 to 2016, Carson was an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She is Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at New York University and was a judge for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize. She also participated in the Bush Theatre's project Sixty Six Books, for which she had written a piece entitled Jude: The Goat at Midnight based upon the Epistle of Jude from the King James Bible. Once every year, Carson and her husband, Robert Currie, teach a class called Egocircus about the art of collaboration at New York University. On November 16, 2012, Carson received an honorary degree from the University of Toronto. Carson delivered a series of "short talks", or short-format poems on various subjects, as the address to the Ph.D. graduating class of 2012. Anne Carson's 2013 book Red Doc> was reviewed by Kathryn Schulz as, She received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize for Red Doc> and is recognized as a major 21st century poet. In 2015, her translation of Sophocles' tragedy Antigone was performed in Luxembourg and at the Barbican Centre. The production was directed by Ivo van Hove and starred Juliette Binoche.
''Eros the Bittersweet''
In 1986 Carson published her first book, Eros the Bittersweet. Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern Library, the book traces the concept of "eros" in ancient Greece through its representations in poetry of the time. Carson considers seriously how triangular and mimesis desires have been represented in the poetry of Sappho, as well as the relationship of eros to solitude. Famously, Carson analyzes Sappho's Fragment 31 as representing "eros as deferred, defied, obstructed, hungry, organized around a radiant absence – to represent eros as lack."
