Notes from Source: Winning the coveted T.S. Eliot Prize last week has confirmed [Anne Carson]’s status as one of the most celebrated and controversial of contemporary poets. Soon after the prize was announced, Carson, who teaches classics at McGill University in Montreal, was denounced in Britain’s Guardian newspaper by eminent poetry critic Robert Potts for writing “doggerel” that mixes “an occasional (and occasionally cliched) lyricism, some fashionable philosophizing and an almost artless grafting-on of academic materials.” Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson writes poetry that grows out of her professional career as a classics scholar. Following in the tradition of such Greek poets as Sappho, her work is lyrical, allusive and fragmentary. While the fragmentary nature of the early Greek poets is a product of time, since only portions of their work survives, Carson often deliberately gives her poems an incomplete feel in order to invoke parallels with her classical predecessors. Not everyone believes Carson deserves the praise and honours she has received. “Carson is essentially not a poet, she is a prize- reaping machine,” complains David Solway, a writer based in Hudson, Que. “She is at the head of what we might call a gigantic pyramid scheme. Her reputation has been built up in such a way that all the people who have invested in it can no longer blow the whistle because the whole thing will come tumbling down on their heads. Anne Carson is our poetic Enron.”

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