I get that 'poetess' is marked for femininity in a way that 'poet' is not marked for either masculine or feminine. It appears that Watkins has been given the credit/blame for coining 'pronoun envy' simply by virtue of being the most prominent signatory, though I gather the letter was very much a group effort. And you can read the letter in question in the Crimson archive (with various digitization errors) here. Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and cultureĬarson seems to base her history on the account given by Anna Livia in her book Pronoun Envy, in which the phrase is credited to a letter to the Harvard Crimson from 'Watkins et al.' (really the entire linguistics department).Then again, I never spent much time back of the Divinity School. I was far away from Cambridge in 1971, but I don't think things changed all that much after 1969, when I was drafted, or before 1972, when I started grad school.

I suspect that it's poetic imagination, because I'm having trouble placing a real-world hockey rink 'back of the Divinity School'. However, she grew tired of designing cereal boxes and returned to the University of Toronto, where she completed her Bachelor's degree in 1974. 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. She returned to university a year later, but dropped out again after second year. Initially 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. It's not clear whether this is purely poetic imagination, or the residue of a couple of years that Carson took off between matriculating at the University of Toronto in 1968 and graduating in 1974: The poem offers first-person memories of hockey games where Harvard divinity students It's nice to see Cal Watkins in a poem, since he contributed so much to the study of Indo-European poetics. And according to Ian Rae's article on Anne Carson in The Literary Encyclopedia, 'Despite her success as a poet, Carson maintains that the study of ancient Greek culture is her main life's work.' In the New Yorker for February 10, 2014, a poem by Anne Carson:

Pronoun Envy by Anna Livia