The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

Anne Carson’s poetry is very beautiful and her use of literary agents may have probably passed right by me. A marriage is dissolving and the narrator contemplates through her character the truth of Beauty that John Keats writes about. The poetry’s structure and syntax are something you need to get used to, but if you move past that, and focus just a bit, you’ll learn to dance along to love, betrayal, and the feelings and thoughts that permeate throughout it all.

She alludes to art and artist such as Marcel Duchamp and his depiction of The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors. She writes things like: *“…thin neck like birch trees…” * and I totally understand, because I know what a birch tree is, I grew up with them. She alludes to John Keats and now I need to read his writings. If you’ve read Carson’s other work, there is a bit of the Hellenistic references that probably completely blew past me. Then there is all her other offhand remarks where she derives from other literature: …printing a passage in italics is a primitive way of soliciting attention warns Fowler’s English Usage”

Her writing and experience is obvious and tantalizing to those of us who are obsessed with reading, experience art and the artist, and love history. Definitely pick this up, as it’s master class, and one of the more interesting and important works to read of this generation.