Product Description

The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities.

In Carson's view Simonides and Celan share a similar mentality or disposition toward the world, language and the work of the poet. Economy of the Unlost begins by showing how each of the two poets stands in a state of alienation between two worlds. In Simonides' case, the gift economy of fifth-century b.c. Greece was giving way to one based on money and commodities, while Celan's life spanned pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, and he himself, writing in German, became estranged from his native language. Carson goes on to consider various aspects of the two poets' techniques for coming to grips with the invisible through the visible world. A focus on the genre of the epitaph grants insights into the kinds of exchange the poets envision between the living and the dead. Assessing the impact on Simonidean composition of the material fact of inscription on stone, Carson suggests that a need for brevity influenced the exactitude and clarity of Simonides' style, and proposes a comparison with Celan's interest in the "negative design" of printmaking: both poets, though in different ways, employ a kind of negative image making, cutting away all that is superfluous. This book's juxtaposition of the two poets illuminates their differences--Simonides' fundamental faith in the power of the word, Celan's ultimate despair--as well as their similarities; it provides fertile ground for the virtuosic interplay of Carson's scholarship and her poetic sensibility.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #193338 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

From Library Journal
It's hard to imagine two poets farther apart in time and space than Simonides, who lived in fifth century B.C.E. Greece, and Celan, a 20th-century Romanian Jew who lived in Paris and wrote in German. Yet Carson connects them through the idea of economy, the management of resources that determines the nature of one's poetry as well as one's life. Carson is an acclaimed poet herself (her Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, was nominated last year for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry), and if her subject is daunting and her style elliptical, at least she counters scholarly woolgathering with lapidary anecdote: of Simonides leaving a banquet after being told by a stingy host that his fee would be halved only to witness the collapse of the roof and the death of everyone inside; of Celan fleeing before Nazi exterminators and returning to find his house sealed and his parents taken to the camp where they would die. In their work, both writers not only measured off the area "within which word holds good," writes Carson, but also discovered that "it is a limited area." For academic collections only.ADavid Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
[Carson] convincingly draws out the fraternity of tone and inclination in two poets far removed in time, experience, and language, a significant accomplishment. It is. . . .difficult to do full justice to her book--rich, delicate, and complex. . . . An act of grace. -- Review

Review
Erudite and entertaining, effortlessly able to play across a range of associations, the book traces a number of similarities in artistic approach between two writers who would seem, on the face of it, to have inhabited very different worlds . . . Economy of the Unlost is a beguiling piece of work, both scholarly and persuasive.
(Elizabeth Lowry London Review of Books )

This is one of those rewarding, original, rigorously attentive books that only Anne Carson could have written. At its core is an idea-the way the overlapping senses of 'economy' play out in language and in monetary history-that only this brilliant poet/classicist could have come up with. Economy of the Unlost is a strange book, bringing together as it does Simonides and Paul Celan; but its strangeness is one of its great virtues, for startling insights spring uncannily off every page.
(Wendy Lesser, Editor The Threepenny Review )

[A] magnificent and lovely essay. . . . I never wanted [the] book to end. .. .
(Stanley Corngold, Modernism/Modernity )

[Carson] convincingly draws out the fraternity of tone and inclination in two poets far removed in time, experience, and language, a significant accomplishment. It is. . . .difficult to do full justice to her book--rich, delicate, and complex. . . . An act of grace.
(Danielle Allen Chicago Review )

Customer Reviews

An Eccentric Pleasure
Like _Eros the Bittersweet_, this is a fine example of Carson's scrupulous and beautifully- written scholarship. And like all of her work, the strangeness of her intensity and consideration is charming and virtuosic. The juxtaposition of Simonides and Celan *works* in spite of the centuries separating their oeuvres; even as she's making connections within the text, one wonders how she's going to pull it off--and then she does. Carson's discussion of poetic economy (both monetary and linguistic)--a topic not often discussed in criticism--illuminates the coinages and clipped syntax of Celan, providing leverage on reading a difficult poet, and will most likely prove to be a useful critical tool for reading other modern poets. Carson couples intellectual density with warm, lyrical prose, yielding a text of intricate research and rewarding insight--a rare and real pleasure for readers of poetry and/or criticism.

A Sweet Investment
I can't say enough good things about these lectures, which mesh Celan, Simonides and Karl Marx with a grace that makes their union seem inevitable. The way Carson folds together money, language and memory reminds me of Ezra Pound without the shouting. Her insights have a math-like clarity ("Eureka! I've got it!") that brings two extreme ends of our history under the same light. You'll never mistake negation and loss for modern inventions after reading this book. The coins have changed since Simonides's time but the economy's remarkably the same. The funny thing is, after Carson's dazzling treatment, lament never looked so good.

A stellar performance
This book is unusual in many ways. Firstly, it dares to compare Simonides of Keos, a Greek poet of the 5th century BC, and Paul Celan, a 20th century poet who wrote in German. Secondly, it dares to apply economic ideas, in particular those of Karl Marx, to explain poetry.

What connects Simonides and Celan? They share a sense of alienation and an acute awareness of the limits of what "is;" and they are both masters of composition and language. Anne Carson points out that she chose to look at two men at the same time because the attention devoted to one enhances the attention devoted to the other: "Sometimes you can see a celestial object better by looking at something else, with it, in the sky." (viii)

A particularly fascinating aspect of both poets' work is their preoccupation with nothingness and negation. "Negation links the mentalities of Simonides and Celan. Words for 'no,' 'not,' 'never,' 'nowhere,' 'nobody,' 'nothing,' dominate their poems and create bottomless places for reading." (9) It is exactly these bottomless places in their poems, invisible to the cursory reader, that Anne Carson knows to locate.

Anne Carson divides the book into four chapters. In the first chapter, "Alienation," Carson uses analogies from the sphere of economics most extensively. She explains how the changing economic situation of poets in the fifth century BC accounts for the fact that Simonides was considered the stingiest person of his time (in addition to being one of the smartest). The "economy" in the title of the book refers to the actual life of the poet as a recipient of gifts and money, and to the act of composing poetry. The "unlost" in the title is a more complex idea and hints at the themes of negation and nothingness explored in the other three chapters.

In chapter two, "Visibles Invisibles," Carson discusses Simonides' philosophy of art ("the word is a picture of things") and how painting a picture relates to "painting" a poem. "Simonides is Western culture's original literary critic, for he is the first person in our extant tradition to theorize about the nature and function of poetry." (46) Carson goes on to show how Simonides and Celan use grammar to "render a relationship that is ... deeper than the visible surface of the language," (52) and how both poets' "language has the capacity to uncover a world of metaphor that lies inside all our ordinary speech like a mind asleep." (58) She points to the exact locations in the poems where poetic language indicates an invisible "reality" beyond the reality of ordinary speech, where poetry arises from words and the (visible) surface of language reflects a deeper (invisible) truth.

Chapter three studies Simonides' epitaphs. "No genre of verse is more profoundly concerned with seeing what is not there, and not seeing what is, than that of the epitaph." (73) Epitaphs are inscriptions on graves. Simonides was the most prolific composer of epitaphs in the ancient world, Carson tells us, and set the conventions of the genre. "Tears of Simonides" were the byword for poetry of lament used by Catullus. Epitaphs have two economic aspects: the economics of remuneration and the economics of composition, as the poet has to use his words economically to fit them on the grave-stone. Epitaphs are also related to the visible and the invisible because they connect the living with the dead: "The responsibility of the living to the dead is not simple. It is we who let them go, for we do not accompany them. It is we who hold them here - deny them their nothingness - by naming their names. Out of these two wrongs comes the writing of epitaphs." (85)

Chapter four, "Negation," focuses our attention on the fact that "nothing" needs close thought. "The word lends itself to scary word play, to unanswerable puns, to the sort of reasoning that turns inside out when you stare at it. Simonides and Celan are both poets who enjoy this sort of reasoning and who orient themselves toward reality, more often than not, negatively." (100) Negation is a very powerful tool, and Carson wants our attention for the difference in implied meaning between, say, "Life is suffering" and "Nothing is not painful among men," as Simonides phrased it. Negation is also something uniquely human because a negative is a verbal event, "a peculiarly linguistic resource whose power resides with the user of words."(102) When you say "this is not that" you need to put something present ("this") and something absent ("that") on the screen of your imagination. "The interesting thing about a negative, then, is that it posits a fuller picture of reality than does a positive statement." (102) Carson then shows with examples from Simonides' and Celan's poetry how much beyond the factual these poets can express by not saying "something" but "not nothing."

"Economy of the Unlost" is truly brilliant whenever Anne Carson dissects a poem because she brings to the task both her qualities as scholar of classical Greece and modern poet. I do not always agree with the way she employs metaphors from economics, but I take it that she uses the terms introduced by Karl Marx to point my attention to noteworthy aspects of the poetry even if by today's standards these terms have turned out to be incorrect. When Carson claims, "what is striking in Marx's analysis of the issue is this insight: that to value a piece of work is to price the mortal span," (107) then she and Karl are obviously mistaken. A doodle produced by Bill Gates during a meeting would definitely fetch a higher price than a doodle by yours truly done in the same mortal span of time. But these are quibbles of an economist; they should not detract from my praise of Carson's work.

The bottom line is: this is an outstanding work that brings the best of academic scholarship to the interpretation of poetry. It deserves every of its five stars.