Notes from Source: In one of the final poems in the book, [Anne Carson] writes that “it seemed sweet. / To say Beauty is Truth and stop.” Carson refuses to stop at the easy aphorism, insisting instead that we explore the messiness of a real marriage. As she puts it at the beginning of the seventh poem: “BUT TO HONOR TRUTH WHICH IS SMOOTH DIVINE AND LIVES AMONG THE GODS WE MUST (WITH PLATO) DANCE LYING WHICH LIVES DOWN BELOW AMID THE MASS OF MEN BOTH TRAGIC AND ROUGH.” Quotations from [John Keats] precede each poem, and Carson has, in several cases, included Keats’ corrections and margin notes. (For example, one quotation confusingly reads: “151 She] written over {He} KRD/ JOHN KEATS,/ Otho the Great: A Tragedy in Five Acts, I.I.151 ad 151.”) The Beauty of the Husband includes endless references, not only to Keats, but also to (among others) Plato, Homer, Thucydides, Jane Austen, Samuel Beckett and Georges Bataille. Carson’s playful erudition has always been an appealing aspect of her work. In The Beauty of the Husband, however, the allusions often stand out awkwardly from the central narrative. Carson sometimes tries to integrate references into the text by casually addressing the reader: “You know/ how novelist e / describes the day Hirohito went on air and spoke / as a mortal man”; “Have you ever read The Homeric Hymn to Demeter? / Remember how Hades rides out of the daylight / on his immortal horses swathed in pandemonium.” Well gosh. No, actually.

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