In 'The Glass Essay,' she resorts to this device immediately and often:Īlready, in just three short lines of the 38-page poem's fourth stanza, we encounter loneliness, landscape and season, distinctly echoing past triumphs such as 'The Life of Towns,' as in 'Town of Spring Once Again,' for instance:ĭespite the periods, the enjambment of these lines is obvious and startling.

Where Dickinson used dashes to reveal the full power of a particular word or line, Carson resorts to an unusual frequency of periods, creating abrupt shifts of focus that help the poem encompass as much subject as possible within just a few sparse lines.

Despite international acclaim from scholars such as classicist Guy Davenport, Carson has also been criticized for her 'chopped prose.While experimental verse often risks feeling contrived or convoluted, Anne Carson's ambitious voice builds on accomplishments of previous works such as 'The Life of Towns' - always feeling genuine and purposeful, yielding moments of intense irony, rhythm and blade-sharp line breaks facilitated by Carson's idiosyncratic punctuation.Īside from grammatical and linguistic devices, though, another successful experiment is Carson's capacity for engaging in biography and autobiography simultaneously in 'The Glass Essay,' as Emily Bronte's life becomes a mirror for the speaker's own predicament and contributes an additional layer of complexity and pathos. The poem has been republished in several anthologies, including the 2006 version of The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Ĭarson herself, along with several critics, have referred to the poem as a lyric essay, despite its inclusion in a book of poetry. The first three sections of the poem set up the framework of the poem's structure, describing the narrative environment, physical landscape and interpersonal relationships that concern the narrator. The piece consists of nine distinct subtitled sections, each of which consists of three or four-lined stanzas. Carson describes the poem as an attempt at 'understanding what life feels like.' Composition In the poem, the narrator – who is visiting her mother's home on the Canadian moors – meditates on an ex-lover, the poems of Emily Brontë, and a variety of other interrelated topics. This thirty-six page poem opens Carson's Glass, Irony and God, which was published in 1995. ' The Glass Essay' is a poem by Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson.

Glass irony and god