Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

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Princeton University Press, Apr 19, 2016 - History - 204 pages

The insights presented in the volume are many and wide-ranging, recognizably in tune with the subtlest modern discussions of desire (such as triangulation. or loving what others love), yet offering new solutions to old problems, like the proper interpretation of Plato's Phaedrus. On the frequently discussed effect of literacy on Greek civilization, the book offers a fresh view: it was no accident that the poets who invented Eros were also the first readers and writers of the Western literate tradition.

Originally published in 1986.

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About the author (2016)

Anne Carson was born December 16, 1950. Carson is a poet, an essayist, and a classicist. She is the director of the graduate program in Classics at McGill University, where she also teaches Latin and Greek. Carson is perhaps besst know for Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, which won the 1998 QSPELL Prize for Poetry. Carson recently won the 2001 Griffin Poetry Prize for Men in the Off Hours. Carson also won the T.S. Eliot poetry prize for The Beauty of the Husband, the first woman to win the award in its nine-year history. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998 and received a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship in 2000. Carson is the author of seven books.

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