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https://dura-dundee.org.uk/2016/03/10/unicorn-the-poetry-of-angela-carter-with-an-essay-by-rosemary-hill/

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To celebrate World Poetry Day, here is a poem by Angela Carter, taken from Unicorn: The Poetry of Angela Carter, edited by Rosemary Hill.

To read more of Angela Carter's poetry, you can purchase a copy of Unicorn from Profile Books by clicking here. As the book's blurb puts it:

Despite being one of the most influential - and best-loved - of the post-war English writers, Angela Carter remains little-known as a poet. In Unicorn, the critic and historian Rosemary Hill collects together her published verse from 1963-1971, a period in which Carter began to explore the themes that dominated her later work: magic, the reworking of myths and their darker sides, and the overturning of literary and social conventions. With imagery at times startling in its violence and disconcerting in its presentation of sexuality, Unicorn provides compelling insight into the formation of a remarkable imagination.

You can also watch a short video clip below, courtesy of the London Review Bookshop, in which Rosemary Hill discusses Carter's poetry.

Lastly, Carter's poem 'Two Wives and a Widow', a modern version of William Dunbar's poem and which appears in Unicorn, can also be read at The London Magazine. Indeed, this poem was was originally published in The London Magazine in March 1966.

Happy World Poetry Day!

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To celebrate World Poetry Day, here is a poem by Angela Carter, taken from Unicorn: The Poetry of Angela Carter, edited by Rosemary Hill. To read more of Angela Carter's poetry, you can purchase a copy of Unicorn from Profile Books by clicking here.

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https://youtu.be/p81Kx2v6n44

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"Q. What have unicorns and virgins got in common

A. They are both fabulous beasts."

In the new collection of Angela Carter's mostly forgotten, but viscerally affecting poetry, Carter perverts mythological symbols in order to subvert the mythology of femininity. Just as Simone De Beauvoir lamented that "one is not born, but becomes, a woman," Carter's poetry, particularly the eponymous "Unicorn," deconstructs "woman" as a mythological figure in herself.

As the legend goes, "no hunter can catch a unicorn" with the exception of a virgin, as her purity inexorably draws the unicorn to her. The virgin is sent out into the woods alone, and the unicorn finds her and lays its head in her lap, with all of the vaguely Freudian subtext that entails. In this poem, Carter crafts an intentionally uncomfortable interpretation of this myth in order to unveil the discomfiting contradiction and hypocrisy inherent to the notion of the "virgin."

First, the virgin is "arranged" among the "innocent and fragile leaves," which are "dripping with last night's rain." She is not necessarily innocent or fragile in her own right, but is "arranged" to be so, while the image of the leaves "dripping with last night's rain" creates a tension between a patent sexual connotation and the pure, restorative power of rain, which follows from the baptismal association with water. The juxtaposition of images of purity with equally potent images of "dirty" sexuality illustrates the fundamental paradox of the virgin: she is expected to be "clean," while she is necessarily defined by sexual parameters.

This paradox becomes even more explicit in the next stanza, in which the speaker calls her "the only virgin to be had," and then in the very same line begins the parenthetical: "Strip club agents cramped / in cabinet de voyeur massage their trembling buttocks." This contradiction implies that the virgin is truly a "fabulous beast," as the woman who is ensnaring the unicorn is, in reality, deeply sexualized. In order to call the "unicorn" to her, the virgin needs to be sexually desirable, but in the process of being desired, she loses her chastity. She just barely passes as a "virgin" because she is a sexual being without any sexuality of her own, never asking to be touched, but constantly groped by men who reduce her to an image as insubstantial as the "painted undressed ladies on their ties."

There appears to be a shift in the power dynamic when the "virgin" is allowed to speak; she "love[s] the game, love[s] the chase," she "knows and welcomes each advance." She is not a guileless doe in the woods, but an agent, a player in the game. But even so, she is fully aware of the violence and domination that accompany this game that "turns into war," especially when the unicorn "take[s] out [his] long knife." The unicorn's phallic instrument is preparing to "kill" the virgin, as she will cease to exist once she has lost her defining sexual chastity. And yet this is the entire point of the game which she claims to "love."

The virgin justifies this love by contending that she is the subjugating force in this exchange; she insists, "You think you are possessing me- / But I've got my teeth in you." She stealthily conceals her weapons underneath markers of femininity: "sharp teeth" inside her "dark red lips," the claws underneath the lacquer of her red fingertips. The color red symbolizes sexual passion, while red lips and fingernails are stereotypically seductive physical attributes. She is deriving a sense of empowerment from her sexuality, from her ability to draw the unicorn to her.

But ultimately, this is a fallacious type of empowerment (if only because teeth and claws are no match for a knife). Her power is not the result of any kind of agency on her part; rather, she has some measure of influence over the unicorn's decisions, while the unicorn has the freedom to make his own decisions. The final stanza extrapolates this somewhat despairing view to gender relations in society:

"They sharpen knives; whisper to her

'You can put your knickers back on in a minute, dear.'"

This is the poem's last word, and it doesn't come from the virgin, or from the unicorn, or even from a man necessarily, but a nebulous "they," meaning the men and women who perpetuate the patriarchy. Even if the virgin has power over the unicorn, she still does not have power over herself. "They" have the power to define her, to "arrange" her, to tell her when to put her knickers back on.

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Angela Carter's "Unicorn" and the Illusion of Empowerment Through Objectification

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"Q. What have unicorns and virgins got in common A. They are both fabulous beasts." In the new collection of Angela Carter's mostly forgotten, but viscerally affecting poetry, Carter perverts mythological symbols in order to subvert the mythology of femininity.

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The English novelist Angela Carter is best known for her 1979 book "The Bloody Chamber," which is a kind of updating of the classic European fairy tales. This does not mean that Carter's Little Red Riding Hood chews gum or rides a motorcycle but that the strange things in those tales-the werewolves and snow maidens, the cobwebbed caves and liquefying mirrors-are made to live again by means of a prose informed by psychoanalysis and cinema and Symbolist poetry. In Carter's version of "Beauty and the Beast," retitled "The Tiger's Bride," the beast doesn't change into a beauty. The beauty is changed into a beast, a beautiful one, by means of one of the more memorable sex acts in twentieth-century fiction. At the end of the tale, the heroine is ushered, naked, into the beast's chamber. He paces back and forth:

I squatted on the wet straw and stretched out my hand. I was now within the field of force of his golden eyes. He growled at the back of his throat, lowered his head, sank on to his forepaws, snarled, showed me his red gullet, his yellow teeth. I never moved. He snuffed the air, as if to smell my fear; he could not.

Slowly, slowly he began to drag his heavy, gleaming weight across the floor towards me.

A tremendous throbbing, as of the engine that makes the earth turn, filled the little room; he had begun to purr. . . .

He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. "He will lick the skin off me!"

And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shiny hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.

Imagine that: a great, warm, wet, abrasive tongue licking off skin after skin, down to the bottommost one, which starts to sprout shiny little animal hairs.

Because Carter took on fairy tales, she was sometimes pigeonholed as a "white witch," the sort of person who reads Tarot cards and believes that the earth speaks to her. It didn't help that she favored an outré look, with long, flowing skirts and, in her late years, a great, disorderly mane of white hair. (Andrew Motion said she looked like "someone who'd been left out in a hurricane.") So it's good to see that "The Invention of Angela Carter" (Oxford), by Edmund Gordon, a lecturer in English at King's College London, is a notably levelheaded book. The first thorough account of Carter's life, it is an authorized biography-Gordon had the coöperation of Carter's intimates, and access to her letters and diaries. It shows the faults endemic to that genre: too much detail, together with a suspicious vagueness about family members who are still alive. But it reclaims Carter from the fairy kingdom and places her within what sounds like a real life. Unsurprisingly, we find out that the white witch cared about her reviews and sales.

Carter was born in 1940 and grew up in a quiet, middle-class suburb of London, the second child of a straitlaced mother, Olive-she turned off the TV if a divorced actor came on the screen-and a father, Hugh, who was the night editor of London's Press Association. Both parents spoiled Angela outrageously. She was crammed with treats, bombarded with kittens and storybooks. Her mother never put her to bed until after midnight, when Hugh got back from work-she wanted her company-and, even then, often let her stay up. Hugh brought home long rolls of white paper from the office for her, and as her parents chatted she wrote stories in crayon.

She grew to be a tall, pudgy child, with a stammer. Between those disadvantages and extreme shyness, which she covered with an aloof and frosty manner, she had few friends. Olive redoubled her attentions. Angela was not allowed to dress herself, or to go to the bathroom alone. Finally, she rebelled, went on a diet, and changed from a fat, obliging girl to a skinny, rude girl. She slouched around in short skirts and fishnet stockings, smoking and saying offensive things to her mother.

She was a good student, though, in a good school. The 1944 Butler Act, riding the same democratic wave as the American G.I. Bill, provided grants for gifted children from regular backgrounds to go to élite private schools. Carter, as an adult, had a theory that this created Britain's first real intelligentsia, a group of people who had no interest in using education to maintain the class system but who simply wanted to operate in a world of ideas. If so, she was one of them. Her teachers urged her to apply to Oxford. Olive, hearing this, pronounced it an excellent idea, and said that she and Hugh would take an apartment there, to be close to her. Angela thereupon dropped all thought of going to university. Marriage, she realized, would be the only way to escape her parents.

Through her father's connections, she got a job as a reporter. She started writing record reviews and liner notes and getting involved in London's music scene. In an independent record store, she met a serious-minded young man, Paul Carter, an industrial chemist who moonlighted as a producer and seller of English folk-song records. Gordon thinks that Paul was the first man to take a romantic interest in Angela. Or, as Angela put it, "I finally bumped into somebody who would . . . have sexual intercourse with me." But Paul insisted that they get engaged first, and so Angela found herself, at twenty, a married woman.

They seem to have been happy at the beginning. Paul taught Angela to love English folk music, thereby giving her a great gift. The folk iconography, in time, offered her an escape hatch from the rather gray realism dominant in British fiction of the period. Folklore also presented her with a set of emotions that, while releasing her, eventually, from sixties truculence, nevertheless felt true, not genteel.

But soon the marriage was failing. Paul suffered engulfing depressions. Sometimes he and Angela barely spoke for days. She felt swollen with unexpressed emotion. "I want to touch him all the time, with my hands & my mouth," she wrote in her diary. "(Poor luv, it annoys him.)" The note of sarcasm here is interesting. Through some miracle, Angela, who had little sexual self-confidence-she once described herself as "a great, lumpy, butch cow . . . titless and broadbeamed"-did not allow Paul's withdrawal to demoralize her. She wanted to save herself. On her twenty-second birthday, her Uncle Cecil, knowing that she was unhappy, invited her to lunch at an Italian restaurant and told her to apply to university. As she recalled, he said to her, "If you've got a degree you can always get a job. You can leave your husband any time you want."

She took his advice. The couple had recently moved to Bristol for Paul's work, and she enrolled in the university there, studying English. Gordon, who is always good at contextualizing, says that Bristol's English department was not ideal for her; it was dominated by the principles of F. R. Leavis, who was intent on rescuing English fiction's "great tradition" from the showy, the sentimental, and the bizarre. Carter, who called this the "eat up your broccoli" school of criticism, managed to hide out in medieval studies, which she loved. She also encountered Freud, gaining, she thought, a scientific support for the world of shock, dream, and eros that she now saw as the realm of art. A little later, she discovered the Surrealists, and learned from them that the goal of art was not truth (as the Leavisites would have it) but the marvellous-indeed, that the marvellous was the truth.All of this fed into her developing feminism. She became an ardent feminist, but not an orthodox one. Her concern was not with justice; she hated the idea of put-upon, suffering women, and implied that they had it coming, by being such weaklings. She wanted women to seize what they needed-power, freedom, sex-and she saw no fundamental difference between the sexes that could prevent that. As she wrote to a friend, Carole Roffe:

Somebody asked me who my favorite women writers were the other day, meaning, I guess, some kind of writers who expressed a specifically feminine sensibility-I said Emily Bronte, who's pure butch, and cursed myself afterwards because the greatest feminine writer who's ever lived is Dostoevsky, followed closely by Herman Melville, who has just the kind of relish of beautiful boys that emancipated ladies such as yourself express. And D. H. Lawrence is infinitely more feminine than Jane Austen, if one is talking about these qualities of sensitivity, vulnerability and perception traditionally ascribed by male critics to female novelists. . . . D. H. Lawrence's tragedy is that he thought he was a man.

I don't know what she means about Dostoyevsky, but her general statement should sound familiar in our day of loose gender definitions.

Energized by her discoveries, she became a bustling presence in her department and the co-editor of its literary magazine. Gordon has gone through the stapled-together pages of this publication, and reports that the best items were pseudonymous poems by Carter. He quotes one called "Unicorn." In the Middle Ages, there was a belief that the only way to catch a unicorn was to send a virgin, alone, into the woods. The unicorn, spying the girl, would come and lay his head in her lap. Such a virgin is the speaker in Carter's poem, but she is not a tender little thing. She is naked, with breasts "like carrier bags" and "curious plantations of pubic hair." The unicorn is drawn to her by "the fragrance of her moist / garden plot." He will be sorry. "I have sharp teeth inside my mouth," she says. "Inside my dark red lips."

At the same time, Carter was producing the first novels that she would be willing to publish. She wrote at a furious speed, turning out narratives of violence that were sometimes layered with comedy, sometimes not. In "Shadow Dance" (1966), her first novel, a man named Honeybuzzard carves up the face of an annoyingly virtuous girl, Ghislaine. (After she gets out of the hospital, he finishes the job, strangling her and leaving her naked corpse in an attic.) A year after that came "The Magic Toyshop," in which the orphaned heroine is sent to live with her uncle, a sadistic puppeteer. In one scene, he forces her to play Leda to a mechanical swan. Her next two efforts were in a similar vein. There are excellent things in all these books, but there is also a strong suggestion that Carter is still trying to drive her mother crazy. Even when the material is not shocking, the treatment is often self-indulgent. An editor once forwarded to her a reader's report describing a novel of hers as "a queer little book." Carter, always lovably forthright, replied that the person who wrote that "put her finger on my weakest spot, which is a tendency to a batty kind of whimsicality." She said she was sure she would work out some satisfactory solution.

She did. In 1969, Carter received a Somerset Maugham Award, worth five hundred pounds, to be used for foreign travel. She decided that she would grant herself an old wish, to go to Japan. She arrived in September of that year, without Paul.

"I arrived by air, in the dark," she wrote, two years later. "When night descended over the ocean, many unfamiliar stars sprang out in the sky; as we approached land, there began to blossom below me such an irregular confusion of small lights it was difficult to be certain if the starry sky lay above or below me. So the aeroplane ascended or descended into an electric city where nothing was what it seemed at first and I was absolutely confused." There she is-dizzy, suspended between two beds of light. It is like a painting of a conversion experience, and, by the time she wrote it, she surely knew that.

Within a few weeks, at a Tokyo coffeehouse a Japanese man, Sozo Araki, twenty-four years old-six years her junior-stopped at her table. She described the scene in a later, unpublished story: " 'Where are you from?' he asked her. 'England,' she said. 'That must be terribly boring,' he said & gave her the great international seducer's smile." They ended up, that evening, in a "love hotel," the kind that rents rooms by the hour. The next morning, she went back to where she was staying, to take a shower, while he played pachinko, a Japanese version of pinball. Then they met again, had breakfast, and went to another hotel. Gordon tries hard to determine what Carter and Araki talked about when they weren't having sex. Araki had recently dropped out of a university program in political science, intending to write a novel, and they apparently did discuss fiction. He liked Faulkner and Dostoyevsky. It seems, though, that he liked Elvis Presley and pachinko better.

But literary companionship was not what she was looking for. Nor, it appears, were her interests merely, or even primarily, sexual. Carter seems to have been seeking a sort of rapture, a sensation of being carried to a new place, or to an old, ideal one. "His face did not, when I first met him, seem to me the face of a stranger," she wrote of Araki. "His image was already present somewhere in my head, & I was seeking to discover him in reality, searching every face for the right face." She later said that in Japan she had "taken certain ideas (like living for love) as far as they will go." Gordon feels that she doesn't seem to mean love, exactly, but something like love-an idea, a Platonic idea.

As for the husband who was waiting for her in England, "I can't live with him anymore," she wrote to a friend, "or I'll kill myself & that's that." Two weeks after she met Araki, she had to go to Hong Kong briefly. In the airport's departure lounge, she took off her wedding ring and left it in an ashtray. (She wrote to Paul soon after, asking for a divorce. He took it badly. More than forty years later, he refused to speak to Gordon.) That was one captor disposed of. The other did the job herself. While Angela was back in England that winter, renewing her visa, Olive suffered a pulmonary embolism. Angela went to the hospital, but Olive, upon seeing her, turned her face to the wall. (She had always disliked Paul, but she disliked divorce more.) She died a few days later.

Carter returned to Tokyo, set up house with Araki, and soon found that she had to acquire an additional sort of freedom. Araki liked to go out with his friends at night, and Carter's joining them was not convenient. For one thing, she never learned to speak more than a few words of Japanese. Furthermore, as she soon realized, he was seeing other women-lots of them. (She came to describe him as an "ambulant penis.") One night, as they were undressing, Carter saw a smear of lipstick on Araki's underpants. She didn't wear lipstick. Describing the episode to a friend, she wrote that she burst out laughing.

Carter always said that the two years she spent in Japan were what radicalized her as a feminist. The young women of Tokyo, she wrote, acted as though they had "become their own dolls." Her rejection of that position, and of the enforced gender identity that lay behind it, meant, to her, that she could put up with Araki's infidelities. Gordon believes that she began to enjoy having the night to herself; she could write in quiet and then go to bed with Araki when he came home at five in the morning, once the trains started running again. But, if she could tolerate this routine, he couldn't. While he was out tomcatting, she was earning their daily bread, and, as he told Gordon, "I didn't want to be a gigolo anymore." He left her.

She was brokenhearted, and furious. She had panic attacks. She couldn't eat. Finally, she comforted herself with a young Korean, Mansu Kō. She relieved him of his virginity. In gratitude, he brought her a can of pineapple. He moved in with her almost immediately, and did all the cooking and cleaning. He was two inches shorter than her, and nineteen years old, though she wrote that he looked fourteen: "Every time I pull down his underpants I feel more and more like Humbert Humbert." (She was thirty-one.) He spoke less English than Araki had and didn't have much to say, anyway. "Apart from the sheer delight, he does bore me," she wrote. The boredom didn't cancel out the delight: "the childlike delicacy and precision with which he stirs sugar into his coffee; his small sign of content . . . the way he carries his head, like a bird." But, after five months with him, she went back to England."Apart from the sheer delight, he does bore me." That was what Carter discovered in Japan: the mixed, middle states of the heart. Having thrown pretty much everything else away, she had time to pay attention to this, and, with the clarity she had gained, to present it in very stark imagery. In Japan, her best work went into short fiction-tales, she called them-which she later published in the collection "Fireworks" (1974). The finest of them, "Souvenir of Japan," is a tribute to Araki. Here is the "pleasure hotel" they went to on their first night:

We were shown into a room like a paper box. It contained nothing but a mattress spread on the floor. We lay down immediately and began to kiss one another. Then a maid soundlessly opened the sliding door and, stepping out of her slippers, crept in on stockinged feet, breathing apologies. She carried a tray which contained two cups of tea and a plate of candies. She put a tray down on the matted floor beside us and backed, bowing and apologizing, from the room whilst our uninterrupted kiss continued. He started to unfasten my shirt and then she came back again. This time, she carried an armful of towels. I was stripped stark naked when she returned for a third time to bring the receipt for his money.

There love is mixed with comedy. Three paragraphs later, it is mixed with death, a beautiful death: "I should have liked to have had him embalmed and been able to keep him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me." A glass coffin: "Snow White." And that's where she was headed-to fairy tales.

In 1976, she accepted a commission to translate Charles Perrault's fairy tales. She had been back in England for four years, but she was still living off the psychological tank dive of her Japanese period. After the Perrault volume was published, she embarked on "The Bloody Chamber," with her own, reconceived versions of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. This is her great book, the one that only she could have written, the one in which everything that was good in her came to the fore and everything that had been bad became good. She was always best in the short form, as her friend Salman Rushdie noted. In her novels, he wrote, her voice, "that moonstone-and-rhinestone mix of opulence and flim-flam, can be exhausting. In her stories, she can dazzle and swoop, and quit while she's ahead."

The truth is that she never cared much about character development or plot, which are the meat of the novel. In a tale, she could dispense with them, and just go for emotion and image. We get Bluebeard smoking a cigar as "fat as a baby's arm," and the Erl-King gathering his dinner in the woods: "He knows which of the frilled, blotched, rotten fungi are fit to eat; he understands their eldritch ways, how they spring up overnight in lightless places and thrive on dead things." In "The Company of Wolves," Carter's famous version of "Little Red Riding Hood," the heroine doesn't struggle with the wolf. She goes to bed with him. Her grandmother's bones rattle beneath the bed. She doesn't hear them.

That was her peak, "Fireworks" and "The Bloody Chamber." Strange to say, she wrote most of those unsettling stories in a period of relative contentment. Maybe she needed that in order to get past the aggressive luridness of her early work. In any case, she told an interviewer that she had a rather nice time in her thirties: "I started doing things like foreign travel and having a house, and you know, watching television and things like that." Soon she had someone steady to do those things with. One day, two years after her return from Japan, one of her water faucets burst. She had seen a construction worker in the house opposite, and she ran to get him. His name was Mark Pearce, another nineteen-year-old. (She was now thirty-four.) "He came in," Carter said, "and never left."

He was strikingly handsome. Friends said he looked like Jesus; tellingly, she claimed that he looked like a werewolf. He was silent most of the time, but she didn't mind, because she liked to do the talking, just as she liked being older. He went on doing construction work, she went on writing-and that was their life, except for one big change, in 1983: Carter, at the age of forty-three, gave birth to a son, Alexander. This made her very happy-repeatedly, she had had phantom pregnancies-but Mark was really the one who raised Alex. It was a bohemian household, with dirty dishes stacked in the sink, but they liked having people over. Carter was a good cook. Rushdie told Gordon that, when he was in hiding, after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against him, his bodyguards always enjoyed it when he went to visit Carter, because she invariably had a nice meal for them to eat, and they could watch TV.A recurrent theme of Gordon's book is Carter's position as a woman in her profession. This is tiresome but unavoidable: in the nineteen-eighties, there was a much-trumpeted spurt of energy in English fiction, with the rise of a number of talented young men, notably Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Julian Barnes. In 1981, Rushdie's second novel, "Midnight's Children," won the Booker Prize, and McEwan's second, "The Comfort of Strangers," was short-listed. Barnes was short-listed in 1984. Carter was never short-listed, let alone given the prize, and she did feel that this was, in part, because she was a woman. In 1984, she told an interviewer:

It would be whingeing to say that men who are no better than I are very much more famous and very much richer and also regarded as . . . the right stuff. It would ill become me. But it's amazing what the Old Boys' club does for itself. They list the "important British contemporary writers," and they'll list Malcolm Bradbury and Kingsley Amis, and they'll leave out Doris Lessing, who's the only one with a really huge international reputation.

There was a generational aspect, too. Carter was most of a decade older than the others, born a few months into the Second World War rather than after it, and her Freudian-influenced, "mythic" subject matter was out of step with their more postmodern concerns, their explorations of language, narrative, and representation. Still, there is no question that being female was part of the reason that Carter received less attention. Rushdie says that though she did wish for greater recognition, "she was not ever envious of other people's success." That must have been a comfort to them.

Soon after her son was born, Carter started to age quickly, as she recorded in her diary: "I catch myself in the mirror looking like my father." She resented this, and reacted defiantly, adopting, according to one friend, "a madwoman-in-the-attic look." Yet Gordon seems to think that, on balance, she got happier as she got older. This is certainly suggested by her final novel, "Wise Children," in which a seventy-five-year-old woman, Dora Chance, tells of the life that she and her identical-twin sister had as music-hall artists. In a sense, "Wise Children" is about what happens to women when they're no longer salable, but it's hard to locate a note of regret, because the book contains so much life and fun-nice dresses and memorable fornications and wild parties and theatre, theatre, theatre. ("We were wet for it," Dora recalls.) The sisters now live in a basement apartment with an ex-wife of their father's, drinking tea out of chipped mugs until six, when they switch to gin. The whole thing is as lovable and comfortable as an old shoe.

Early in 1991, just before "Wise Children" was published, Carter went to the doctor with a pain in her chest and was told that she had a cancerous tumor on her right lung which had spread to her lymph nodes, making it inoperable. Strong-minded woman that she was, she laid aside her plans for a new novel-"Adela," about Jane Eyre's pupil, Mr. Rochester's daughter-and went to work, fast, with an assistant, on a collection of her nonfiction. (Over the years, needing the money, she had written many magazine articles.) She and Mark got married, as they had neglected to do previously, and, week after week, she got dressed and sat up straight to have goodbye teas with her friends. In February, 1992, she died at home, at the age of fifty-one. She was young, and she had had only a few years of absolutely first-rank work, but that is true of many writers, including some of the greatest. She had her time, and it was wonderful. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated Angela Carter's age at the time of her death.

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A new biography shows how the British author made fairy tales psychological and sexy.

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ngela Carter's reputation has had a switchback ride. She went, as she put it, from being "a very promising young writer" in the 60s to being "completely ignored in two novels". Her critical status revived in the 80s with the reimagined fairy stories of The Bloody Chamber and the films The Magic Toyshop and The Company of Wolves, but she never enjoyed what she called "the pleasantest but most evanescent kind of fame, which is that during your own lifetime". Since her death in 1992 her stock has risen. She has been called one of the 20th century's best writers and Lambeth council has named a street in Brixton after her.

In 2012, when the London Review of Books asked me to write a piece on Carter's work, I had mixed feelings. I was of the 80s generation that did not so much read as inhale her in my 20s, and what impresses you at that age doesn't always bear revisiting. She did. I found her improved by time, having outgrown the categories - magic realist, feminist, gothic - into which she had been awkwardly crammed. I realised too that she was funnier than my earnest younger self had noticed, so I reread all of the work I could find. But I found no poetry.

I knew she had written verse because my first husband, the poet Christopher Logue, who died in 2011, had said more than once that her poetry was underrated. Constructing as best I could Christopher's likely train of thought, I got his old school tuck box out of the wardrobe. Here he kept books he especially valued. Among the treasures, such as his letter from Ezra Pound, I found a stapled, roneoed copy of Carter's poem "Unicorn", published in Bristol in 1966.

In it I saw, as if in bud, the ideas that grew into the extravagant, sometimes sinister blossoms of her later work. The poem reconfigures the myth of the lady and the unicorn, subject of a million tapestries and table mats. Carter rearranges it almost literally, as if playing with characters in a toy theatre. "Let us cut out and assemble our pieces," runs the first line, and later the reader is told to "bend the tab, slit in slot marked 'X'". At 23 it seems that Carter had arrived, as if in a single bound, in the mysterious forest that was to keep her supplied with ideas for the rest of her life. She saw at once how myths and folk tales offer a kind of narrative flat pack, pre-existing characters and stories that can be restructured according to the tastes of each generation.

"Unicorn", like T he Bloody Chamber, draws out what a post-Freudian age sees beneath the surface - the phallic unicorn's horn, the virgin in the garden - draws it out, blows it up into imagery as lurid as a flashing neon sign outside a sex shop and then drops it bathetically flat at the end. This woodland's "innocent and fragile leaves" conceal the strip-club agents who are using an unappealing virgin, "raw and huge ... the only virgin to be had" to lure the unicorn. As Carter once said of Walter de la Mare, a writer she, surprisingly perhaps, much admired, these are images that stick like a splinter in the mind.

I decided to try to republish as much of the verse as I could find. There is not much. Carter's career as a poet lasted less than a decade and was concentrated in three years, from 1963 to 1966. The 60s were, as she said, "not like the movies". The poems, and the magazines in which she published them, are redolent of a period that still felt itself to be postwar, where the last Edwardians overlapped with the Angry Young Men. They reveal a melancholy urban landscape through which pop art and swinging London are starting to burst like weeds on a bomb site. Carter's first novel appeared in the year the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" topped the charts, and soon afterwards she more or less stopped writing verse. Most of what she did write, however, had its roots in the strange little drama set in motion in "Unicorn".

Unicorn: The Poetry of Angela Carter is published by Profile. To order a copy for £7.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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Rediscovering Angela Carter's poetry: Images that stick and splinter in the mind

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ngela Carter's reputation has had a switchback ride. She went, as she put it, from being "a very promising young writer" in the 60s to being "completely ignored in two novels".