‘Cutting the Threads with Words’: the Figure of Penelope in the Poetry of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

Abstract

Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (1939–2020) is one of Greece’s leading female poetic voices with a work that spans over thirty years. She was also a linguist and an acclaimed translator. Her work is widely read in Greece and it has also received official recognition: it has been awarded the Greek National Poetry Prize in 1985 and the Greek Academy’s Poetry Prize in 2000. The body, myth and nature but above all language and its ability to convey emotions and experiences are central features of her poetry. This essay discusses Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s poetics with reference to her revision of the character of Penelope in three seminal poems. Her original reworking of the myth shows her knowledge of feminist discourse such as the writing of Adrienne Rich and Hélène Cixous. Above all, it reveals that she was a careful poet-reader. I discuss her affinities with Elisaveta Bagryana’s ‘Penelope of the 20^th Century’ (1934) and, perhaps surprisingly, her dialogue with Wallace Stevens’ brilliant poem ‘The World as Meditation’ (1952). The essay also addresses the wider question of the use of ancient Greek myth in feminist writing and by women poets in Greece.