Anne Hathaway

Carol Ann Duffy is one of those writers who's a little obsessed with the fact that she's a writer. She just loves writing about writing (and sometimes even writing about writing about writing). Writing is one of her favorite metaphors for love (and for sex) and it appears across a number of her poems. Of course, Carol Ann Duffy didn't invent writing about writing. In fact, this motif is all over Shakespeare's sonnets, where he often comments that he will immortalize his beloved through his poetry. If you write it down, it's forever. In "Anne Hathaway," Duffy immortalizes Anne in the same way. She gives the fictionalized Anne a chance to speak for herself. And when she has this chance, what does she write about? Writing and love. It seems that Duffy's Anne and Shakespeare made a good pair after all.