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The Sleeping Beauty
For this revised edition of his epic meditation on the nature of Romance, first published in 1982 (Harper & Row), Carruth has added a 125th canto and clarified several others. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1982
About the author
Hayden Carruth
126 books48 followersHayden Carruth was an American poet, literary critic, and anthologist known for his distinctive voice, blending formal precision with the rhythms of jazz and the blues. Over a career spanning more than sixty years, he published over thirty books of poetry, as well as essays, literary criticism, and anthologies. His work often explored themes of rural life, hardship, mental illness, and social justice, reflecting both his personal struggles and his political convictions.
Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, Carruth studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago. His early career included serving as editor-in-chief of Poetry and as an advisory editor of The Hudson Review for two decades. He later became poetry editor at Harper’s Magazine and held teaching positions at Johnson State College, the University of Vermont, and Syracuse University, where he influenced a new generation of poets.
Carruth received numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Collected Shorter Poems (1992) and the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey (1996). His later works, such as Doctor Jazz and Last Poems, further cemented his reputation as a major voice in American poetry. His influential anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us remains a landmark collection of American verse.
Born in Waterbury, Connecticut, Carruth studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and later earned an M.A. from the University of Chicago. His early career included serving as editor-in-chief of Poetry and as an advisory editor of The Hudson Review for two decades. He later became poetry editor at Harper’s Magazine and held teaching positions at Johnson State College, the University of Vermont, and Syracuse University, where he influenced a new generation of poets.
Carruth received numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Collected Shorter Poems (1992) and the National Book Award for Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey (1996). His later works, such as Doctor Jazz and Last Poems, further cemented his reputation as a major voice in American poetry. His influential anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us remains a landmark collection of American verse.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 16, 2022
An amazing storyline concept entwining the fairytale with history, humanity, abuse, war and Nature...as I'd Sleeping Beauty, in her long dreamstate, is creation itself, or Mother Nature herself, at once revered, ignored, and abused...absolutely stunning, though some poems I really don't resonate with, especially the poems of dialougue with an old timey ghost (not sure why, just don't like them, haha!!).
July 12, 2025
Short version without a ton of detail...satisfactory...until the ending with a statement regarding fashion. Hmmm....
Also, the genre says...poetry?!? I entered the ISBN number for this book and this is the edition it gave me, yet, I had no hint of any type of poetry...so...I won't be sharing this version with my second graders.
Also, the genre says...poetry?!? I entered the ISBN number for this book and this is the edition it gave me, yet, I had no hint of any type of poetry...so...I won't be sharing this version with my second graders.
April 7, 2021
Mythic.
October 26, 2021
A beautiful book-length poem in which the poet explores love through the various voices and narratives of myth and contemporary life. A powerful piece that demands reading and rereading.
August 11, 2022
No matter how hard men try, they cannot understand nor describe the pain of being a woman. In fact, to Carruth, the only joy and purpose of women is to be fucked. Dissapointed.
February 22, 2014
I was truly captivated by this long poem in which Hayden Caruth visits the legend of the sleeping beauty or the Dornröschen, the Princess of the Briar Rose, in the landscape of history. His discoveries are revealed through three characters: the princess, the prince, and the poem. Grounded in the countryside and people of Vermont where he had once lived, Caruth is guided by a ghost Amos, who brings him back to himself in the present from his somewhat erratic dream-wandering in the past. Here too in the Vermont countryside we find an eerie motif that threads through the mostly 15-line cantos, the stone image of a woman’s face submerged in the stream, reminding us of the continuous presence of the feminine just below the surface of nature.
Caruth represents the prince as a series of persons or events of historic, sometimes mythical, significance drawing on his cultural roots in Black, Teutonic and Greek traditions. Like his own name, Hayden, these begin with the letter h. Who knew there were so many of significance, both for good and ill, whose signification began with h? Beginning with Homer and bringing in such flesh-and-blood greats as Hegel and Hesse, he also includes such literary characters as Hamlet and Heathcliff with their troubled attributes, but a nod to Herod and Hitler? Caruth is not afraid to bring in the brutish and cruel as well as the insensitive side of the prince. And the reader cannot dismiss the thought that Caruth is dissecting aspects of himself in each of these characters. The poem then becomes the guide.
In Canto 74, Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, is the feminine exception to the kaleidoscope of princes with monikers that begin with h. She is the guard, the ageless, even sexless, hag who keeps the order, and hence becomes the constant that assures the submerged feminine in the male as well as the female will flame up from the banked embers of history to continue our very existence, our own beauty, notwithstanding how ordinary it may be.
This poet reveals a basic template of our psychic existence in the sleeping beauty, and has translated it at a personal brought to a literary level that shows us something of our modern day reality. We sense the feminine is always sleeping, always ready to be awakened by the kiss, and is strangely present and awake when we have moments of synthesis, of wholeness.
Caruth represents the prince as a series of persons or events of historic, sometimes mythical, significance drawing on his cultural roots in Black, Teutonic and Greek traditions. Like his own name, Hayden, these begin with the letter h. Who knew there were so many of significance, both for good and ill, whose signification began with h? Beginning with Homer and bringing in such flesh-and-blood greats as Hegel and Hesse, he also includes such literary characters as Hamlet and Heathcliff with their troubled attributes, but a nod to Herod and Hitler? Caruth is not afraid to bring in the brutish and cruel as well as the insensitive side of the prince. And the reader cannot dismiss the thought that Caruth is dissecting aspects of himself in each of these characters. The poem then becomes the guide.
In Canto 74, Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, is the feminine exception to the kaleidoscope of princes with monikers that begin with h. She is the guard, the ageless, even sexless, hag who keeps the order, and hence becomes the constant that assures the submerged feminine in the male as well as the female will flame up from the banked embers of history to continue our very existence, our own beauty, notwithstanding how ordinary it may be.
This poet reveals a basic template of our psychic existence in the sleeping beauty, and has translated it at a personal brought to a literary level that shows us something of our modern day reality. We sense the feminine is always sleeping, always ready to be awakened by the kiss, and is strangely present and awake when we have moments of synthesis, of wholeness.
June 28, 2011
In 124 pages of thematic poetry, one would expect that the collection would enter into some kind of dialogue with itself. There are some recurring themes - the sleeping beauty's dreams of historical and archetypical men and the oppression of women throughout history, the disappearance of a certain way of life from rural New England (related to each other how?? no real link is established between them), a sculpting of a woman's face left below the waters of stream - but overall it's just a book of poetry, and a fairly unexceptional one at that.
It does have a few excellent passages, such as this, which make it worth keeping:
27
Wind in the pines, a dark, damp, Novemb'ring wind,
And here with small, small song the redpolls flittering,
Branch to branch, maybe nine of a kind,
And here an oak leaf skittering
Down the cold brook, in its brown curl holding nine
Grains of new snow, maybe you and your almost divine
Eight sisters quarreling to your lover,
Cold Orpheus, where he waits; and over
The brook maybe your small, small souls flit on
Cheeping their quarreling song
Per una selva oscura, downstream and down
The humid wind, your boat sailing along,
A curled brown leaf of oak, nine new grains of snow,
Past the stone face of the lady of water, sung
Through these dark woods by nine little birds as they go.
It does have a few excellent passages, such as this, which make it worth keeping:
27
Wind in the pines, a dark, damp, Novemb'ring wind,
And here with small, small song the redpolls flittering,
Branch to branch, maybe nine of a kind,
And here an oak leaf skittering
Down the cold brook, in its brown curl holding nine
Grains of new snow, maybe you and your almost divine
Eight sisters quarreling to your lover,
Cold Orpheus, where he waits; and over
The brook maybe your small, small souls flit on
Cheeping their quarreling song
Per una selva oscura, downstream and down
The humid wind, your boat sailing along,
A curled brown leaf of oak, nine new grains of snow,
Past the stone face of the lady of water, sung
Through these dark woods by nine little birds as they go.
January 27, 2014
According to the dust Jacket on this second hand first edition:
'Carruth is surely one of the few nearly great lyric poets alive and writing in America today. He continues to grow and to publish poems of great humanity and technical skill-i.e. they move us deeply in ways instructively humane."
What does that mean? 'Surely one of the few nearly great lyric poets'. I think it's meant to be a compliment. But does it mean there were great lyric poets and he's not quite up to their standards, or does it mean there are a few nearly great lyric poets but no great lyric poets. Neither sounds like a ringing endorsement. What does the 'nearly' mean? How does one get to be "nearly great" or miss out on being great? Does he continue to grow poems or is he just a late physical developer? And while we're it, who is this "us" who are moved deeply?
This little piece of blurb, written by one Stephen Berg, has entertained me far more than the book did. Which says enough about the book. So far, in my quest for rewritings of fairy tales, Angela Carter is still light years ahead of the competition. And Carter's prose, at its best, is much more interesting than Carruth's "poetry".
'Carruth is surely one of the few nearly great lyric poets alive and writing in America today. He continues to grow and to publish poems of great humanity and technical skill-i.e. they move us deeply in ways instructively humane."
What does that mean? 'Surely one of the few nearly great lyric poets'. I think it's meant to be a compliment. But does it mean there were great lyric poets and he's not quite up to their standards, or does it mean there are a few nearly great lyric poets but no great lyric poets. Neither sounds like a ringing endorsement. What does the 'nearly' mean? How does one get to be "nearly great" or miss out on being great? Does he continue to grow poems or is he just a late physical developer? And while we're it, who is this "us" who are moved deeply?
This little piece of blurb, written by one Stephen Berg, has entertained me far more than the book did. Which says enough about the book. So far, in my quest for rewritings of fairy tales, Angela Carter is still light years ahead of the competition. And Carter's prose, at its best, is much more interesting than Carruth's "poetry".
August 20, 2012
The jacket describes this as "looking back to the love poetry of the troubadours in subject and tone but is, ... a criticism of the attitude toward women, love, and exploitation which extends from this tradition to the more crass and sexist strains of modernism."
I rated this lower than his more personal poetry, probably due to its (advertised) polemical approach.
I rated this lower than his more personal poetry, probably due to its (advertised) polemical approach.
February 8, 2013
Just picked up a first edition, hardcover for 99 cents -- no matter the price, you can put a value on this collection. Pair it with a good Malbec, some Pee Wee Russell and a selection of Paul Goodman's work and you've got a party -- just don't drive after this experience.
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April 29, 2013811.54 C3198s 1982
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews