Anne Carson burst onto the international poetry scene in 1987 when she published the long poem “Kinds of Water” in Grand Street, an American magazine devoted to poetry, art and short fiction. “Kinds of Water” subsequently appeared in The Best American Poetry of 1990, and since then Carson has won a Lannan Award (1996), Pushcart Prize (1997), Guggenheim Fellowship (1998), MacArthur Fellowship (2000), and Griffin Prize (2001). Perhaps because of the extensive coverage the media has given Carson's publications and awards, she is notoriously reticent about her personal life. The biographical note in her books consists of one short sentence: “Anne Carson lives in Canada”. Carson has also pressured her current publisher, Knopf, to remove all promotional blurbs and quotations from the jacket covers of her books. For example, on the cover of Autobiography of Red, Michael Ondaatje proclaims that “Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today”, but such quotations migrate to the back cover in subsequent publications and then disappear. Although championed by Susan Sontag, Harold Bloom, Alice Munro, and other literary heavyweights, Carson shuns the role of literary celebrity and works hard to redirect attention to her writing.

However, a few facts are known about Carson's life. She was born in Toronto, Ontario, on June 21st 1950. She grew up in several small towns (Stoney Creek, Port Hope, Timmins) in Ontario where her father worked as a banker. Raised Irish Catholic, Carson was so enthralled by an illustrated copy of The Lives of the Saints that, at the age of five, she tried to eat its pages. In her teens, Carson's literary tastes changed and she resolved to study Classics because Oscar Wilde had done so. As it happened, a Latin instructor at Carson's high school in Hamilton knew ancient Greek and volunteered to teach her the language over lunch hours. Carson went on to study Latin and Greek at the University of Toronto and has acquired French and a reading knowledge of German over time. Initially, however, Carson was frustrated with the compulsory courses required to complete an undergraduate arts degree – in particular the study of Milton – and she dropped out after first year. She returned to university a year later, but dropped out again after second year. Perhaps inspired by the pragmatic values of her ancestor Egerton Ryerson (the 19th-century Ontario educator for whom Ryerson Polytechnical University is named), Carson attended commercial art school for one year. However, she grew tired of designing cereal boxes and returned to the University of Toronto, where she completed her Bachelor's degree in 1974. She stayed in Toronto to complete a Master's degree in Classics in 1975 and then spent a year in Scotland getting a diploma in Classics from the University of St. Andrews (1975-76), where she studied Greek under Kenneth Dover. Carson returned to Toronto to write a Ph.D. dissertation on Sappho (1981) that laid the groundwork for her first book, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Now a professional scholar, Carson has produced one other book of criticism, Economy of the Unlost, as well as five collections of poetry: Glass, Irony and God, Plainwater, Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours, and The Beauty of the Husband. Despite her success as a poet, Carson maintains that the study of ancient Greek culture is her main life's work. She teaches Classics at McGill University in Montreal and has also taught at the University of Calgary (1979), Princeton University (1980-1987), and Emory University (1987).

While teaching at Princeton, Carson published Eros the Bittersweet (1986) and laid the groundwork for her subsequent publications. In Eros, Carson begins with Sappho's description of desire as “bittersweet” and argues that “[a]ll human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies”. Noting that the Greek term eros signifies “want” or “lack”, Carson develops a theory of desire in which Eros mediates between subject and object, deferring the attainment of desire, but also creating the desire for desire. Carson then applies this quasi-Derridean theory to ancient Greek lyric and romance, all the while formulating the ideas on desire that would come to dominate her poetic output.

As a poet, Carson's popularity owes partly to the accessibility of her lovelorn theme. However, Carson's poetry is also formally complex and book reviewers frequently ask how such a poet can teach and publish prolifically at the same time. This phenomenon might be explained by the fact that Carson's preferred medium of expression is actually painting. For over 20 years prior to the publication of her first chapbook, Short Talks (1992), Carson had concentrated on her passion for the visual arts. She also wrote poetry during this period, but primarily as a component of mixed media endeavours in which she wrote directly on or beside artworks. The prose poems in Short Talks, for example, were originally intended as captions for a series of drawings. Carson's poetry garnered greater interest than the drawings, however, so in frustration she published the poems by themselves. The poems appeared in The Best American Poetry of 1992, among other places, and were collected by Brick Books – an affiliate of Brick, the literary journal associated with Michael Ondaatje. It is not clear how much of Carson's writing derives from her mixed media projects, but her subsequent books are populated by painters and photographers whose unique manners of perceiving influence the framing of the texts.

In 1995 Carson gained a broad North American audience by issuing two collections of poetry with American publishers: Glass, Irony and God (New Directions) and Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Vintage, a division of Knopf). In the former collection, published as Glass and God in Britain, Carson declares her erotic theme early. The heartbroken speaker in “The Glass Essay” confesses:

The vocation of anger is not mine.
I know my source.
It is stunning, it is a moment like no other,
when one's lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore.

This desire for a departed lover, combined with a critical questioning of that desire, produces the mixture of lyric anecdote and academic commentary that typifies Carson's poetic “essays”. For example, in Autobiography of Red, Carson rewrites the tenth labour of Herakles as a gay romance between the mythological monster Geryon and his slayer. She then frames the story with an academic discussion of Stesichoros's Geryoneis. In The Beauty of the Husband, Carson strips away the mythological artifice that characterizes her early work and tells the simple story of a doting wife and her philandering husband. Although Carson maintains that her works are not strictly autobiographical, it is evident that the source of her most acclaimed long poems can be found in the aftermath of an eight-year marriage that ended in 1980.

Glass, Irony and God also includes a glowing introduction by Guy Davenport, an author whose eclectic imagination and unorthodox scholarship matches Carson's own. Davenport observes that Carson “writes philosophy and critical essays that are as beautiful and charming as good poetry” and this confusion of genres defines Carson's style. The essay is a “try” for Carson, a medium of experiment. The poems in this collection showcase Carson's talent for combining seemingly incompatible genres (such as the lyric and essay) and subjects (such as TV and Socrates). The book's most ironic section is the “TV Men” series, which Carson takes up again in Men in the Off Hours. Although Carson has never actually owned a TV, the poems draw from her experience of filming documentaries for a PBS series entitled The Nobel Legacy. The three documentaries discussed the achievements of Nobel Prize-winning scientists, with Carson playing the role of humanist wit.

Like Glass, Irony and God, Plainwater is a collection of long poems and short essays. However, in this outing, Carson clusters her already hybrid essays together to create long poems that are akin to novellas in verse. For example, in “The Anthropology of Water”, Carson groups together three long poems about men who have departed from her life, adds prose introductions to each one, and then frames the whole ensemble with an introductory meditation on the myth of the daughters of Danaos. “The Anthropology of Water”, like “The Glass Essay”, deals movingly with the mental and physical decline of Carson's father, who suffered from Alzheimer's disease. Plainwater is also dedicated to Ben Sonnenberg, the founding editor of Grand Street, who now suffers from multiple sclerosis. Carson met Sonnenberg while living in New York in 1987 and his enthusiasm for Carson's poetry played a vital role in her decision to pursue writing.

The importance of Carson's formal experimentation in Plainwater becomes clear when one turns to Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998). This celebrated “autobiography” of the red monster Geryon, which was nominated for the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award, was originally written in conventional prose. However, Carson was dissatisfied with the result and broke down the novel's structure into distinct sections: an essay on the Greek poet Stesichoros, translated fragments of Stesichoros's Geryoneis, a lyric sequence based on the Geryoneis, a palinode, a mock interview, and two appendices. The novel's seven sections recall the seven sections of the Greek nomos or lyric performance for which Stesichoros was famous. This willful confusion of genres explains the novel's frequent references to Gertrude Stein and, indeed, Carson has stated in interviews that she thinks of writing as process of collage. Compounding the painterly dimension of the novel is the fact that the story was inspired by a series of volcano paintings Carson had done, one of which graces the cover of Glass, Irony and God. The paintings' fiery colours made Carson think of Geryon, whom some Classicists identify with the volcano El Teide on the island of Tenerife.

In the late 1990s Carson's job situation changed when McGill cancelled all graduate courses in Greek and the Classics Department was absorbed into History. Outraged, Carson delivered a speech entitled “The Idea of a University (After John Henry Newman)” in which she condemned career-oriented university programming and defended the classical pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake. The speech was reprinted in The Threepenny Review (Spring 1999) but did nothing to reverse the amalgamation. Carson reacted by deciding to teach half of every year in the United States. She has been a guest lecturer at the University of Michigan (Fall 1999), the University of California, Berkeley (Spring 2000), and the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (Spring 2001). Since Carson initially made her literary reputation in the United States, she feels comfortable alternating between Canadian and American institutions. Her mother's relatives also come from Pennsylvania.

While teaching in Michigan, Carson revealed to some of her colleagues that she had written a libretto based on the life and martyrdom of the French mystic Marguerite Porete. They encouraged her to turn the libretto into a Web-based “installation opera” called The Mirror of Simple Souls (http://www.ummu.umich.edu/programs/souls/intro.html). The installation consists of seven cybernetic “rooms” designed by Carson's students, with music composed by one of the students. Carson has used some of the US $500,000 she received from the MacArthur Foundation to underwrite the opera's production.

Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan (1999) compares the poetic economy of the ancient Greek poet to the verse of the German holocaust survivor by interpreting their work through Classical and modern theories of commodity exchange. One Canadian poet-critic, David Solway, has accused Carson of plagiarizing portions of this study. Solway's quarrel is over a footnote aside, Carson's genius, however, continues to reside in her ability to juxtapose authors and draw connections between them in an innovative and insightful fashion.

Carson's first book of the new millennium, Men in the Off Hours (2000), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize in Britain. Men in the Off Hours experiments with individual lyrics and short sequences and breaks with Carson's established pattern of writing long poems. The collection concludes with the short but moving prose piece “Appendix to Ordinary Time”, which uses crossed-out passages from the diaries and manuscripts of Virginia Woolf to fashion a rare autobiographical dedication to Carson's mother, Margaret (1913-1997), who died during the writing of the book. Margaret's death prompted Carson's only sibling, her brother Michael, to resume contact with his family after a silence of 27 years. His long absence is the subject of Carson's poem “The Wishing Jewel” in Plainwater, and no doubt informs her translation of Sophocles's Electra (2001), in which the heroine longs for the return of her brother. Tragically, Michael died in March, 2000.

This sudden loss of family has profoundly affected Carson, but it has not slowed her literary production. She lives alone in a rented apartment in Montreal where she continues to write, using one desk for her academic projects and one for her poetic endeavours. Her most recent collection, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001) is a meditation on the Keatsean belief that beauty is truth. Carson has also begun producing one-of-a-kind books consisting of photographs, paintings, and poems that she compiles by hand and distributes among friends.