Anne Carson’s roaming imagination

Like any self-appointed highest honour, the Nobel Prize in Literature often fails to satisfy demand. Not because those who receive it are undeserving, but rather because of the nagging absence of those who have yet to receive it. For years, a name that had consistently been on the list of contenders was Anne Carson. So when the Nobel committee announced her as the winner for 2026, no one was surprised and no one was disappointed – Carson has been lauded for the singularity of her voice and vision. When the Nobel committee called Carson to tell her she had been awarded the prize, she was in Iceland – ‘listening to the wind’, she said. It was a perfect response. From Homer’s ‘winged words’ to Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ – the wind has always been the poet’s business.

Carson’s work defies categories. It doesn’t sit easily on any one shelf, and to try to summarise the range of her talents is to do her a disservice. She has been praised for her innovation and inventiveness, blending verse, prose, essay, in modes lyrical, confessional and scholarly, as well as making use of multiple languages, translations and fragments. Innovation implies novelty, but, like all literary innovations, hers have their precedents in antiquity. Carson’s oeuvre, which includes over 20 published books and seven works of translation, lives in flux somewhere between the antique and the modern, in the imaginative space that TS Eliot described, characterised by both the ‘timeless’ and the ‘temporal’ sense, which makes the poet simultaneously traditional and contemporary.

One of her best-known pieces, ‘The Glass Essay’ – an autobiographical poem that includes a stubborn mother, a sick father, a collapsing relationship, but which also features meditations on cold northern moors and musings on the writings of Emily Brontë – is a landmark in the form known as the ‘lyric essay’, a now favoured and dominant genre (in no small part thanks to her). Carson has publicly deflected autobiographical interrogations into her work, while also acknowledging that virtually everything she writes comes out of her own life and experience. In turn, this has had a downstream influence on the genre of ‘autofiction’, which has been the big tent of so much literary fiction for the last decade and a half.

The most remarkable thing about Carson’s writing is the ease of its erudition, how breezily it proceeds, and its utter lack of portentousness. It is earnest, curious, free of self-insistence (something that also comes across in her interviews and public appearances). It is roaming and associative, eschewing the spirit of specialisation, which demands that one only focus on a single thing, but without jettisoning scholarly discipline. She can get Thucydides and Virginia Woolf dialoguing on Time; yoke Rilke and Goya together when thinking about chipmunks; get Sappho, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage to jive on Silence. The sheer breadth of references is stunning. Her ability to blend and make everything live in a modus vivendi belongs to the broader poetic instinct of being attuned to the smallness of things, of how details reveal hidden kinships (this is the foundation of metaphor, of ‘carrying across’) – a way of saying: ‘this thing is like this other seemingly-completely-different thing’.

Autobiography of Red (1998), the book for which she is most celebrated, reimagines Hercules’ tenth Labour and the ‘Geryoneis’ (a lyric poem by Stesichorus, which survives only in fragments), in which the winged monster Geryon and Hercules are transformed into gay teenagers who fall in love. A series of poems titled ‘TV Men’, which appear in Glass, Irony and God (1995) and Men in the Off Hours (2000), features a cast – Hector, Socrates, Sappho, Artaud – caught in the off-screen moments on the sets of made-for-TV films based on their lives. There is also Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, a live piece first performed in 2019, a ‘version’ of Euripides’ Helen, in which Marilyn Monroe sits in for Helen of Troy.

Men in the Off Hours also contains a series of poems whose titles and first lines are taken from verses by Catullus. They are riffs on the originals, modifying, omitting, expanding, pivoting as they please. The following, a personal favourite, is taken from Catullus 46:

Iam Ver Egelidos Refert Tepores (Now Spring Brings Warmths)

Catullus greets the season.

Now spring unlocks.

Now the equinox stops its blue rages quiet

As pages.

I tell you leave Troy leave the ground burning, they did.

Look we will change everything all the meanings

All the clear cities of Asia you and me.

Now the mind isn’t she an avid previous hobo?

Now the feet grow leaves so glad to see whose green baits.

Awaits.

Oh sweet don’t go.

Back the same way go a new way.

Here, the word ‘Egelidos’ (meaning ‘thawed’ or ‘tepid’) is omitted from the title translation. It is characteristic of how Carson works as a translator: some words are left out, some are added, some are bent in, some taken against the grain. Her translation of Sappho – If Not, Winter (2002) – is a gold standard, and her rendering of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon – An Oresteia (2009) – is unlike any other in its pacing and minimalism. These translations often take knowing liberties and are very much Carson’s own, though there is certainly no shortage of etymological spelunking (she once admitted to looking up every word when doing a translation of Sophocles just to make sure she understood their meanings). The labour of translation can be likened to an act of love, or poetic copulation, wherein what gets produced is neither new nor the original, but something that belongs uniquely to the union of two sensibilities.

Very few poets are great critics, and even fewer critics are great poets. Carson is both. Her first major critical work, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), takes as its point of departure a coinage of Sappho’s (γλυκύπικρος ‘sweet-bitter’) and explores the evolution of the concept of Eros throughout the archaic and classical periods. The other, Economy of the Unlost (1999), deals with another kind of coinage, looking at how the introduction of money into Greek society began to chip away at the previous ‘embedded economy’ of gift, kinship and xenia. Evoking Marx’s theory of commodity and alienation, Carson reads a nascent transformation of value into the work of the Greek lyric poet Simonides (the first to charge money for his verses) – and if that were not enough, puts that reading in conversation with the work of Paul Celan.

Both books are notable for their impressionistic passages and intimate tone, avoiding the detached academic idiom that characterises so much of the classics. In her introduction to Economy of the Unlost, Carson notes how, unusually, her ‘training and trainers’ had conditioned her to reinsert the self into scholarly inquiry (‘I do not want to be a windowless monad…’ she says in the same introduction). Carson, in fact, writes much more like an ancient, refusing to recuse herself from her own investigations, and moves the minds of her readers through presence, pathos and eminent aesthetic sense.

As with the ancients, eros and alienation are the twin drivers in Carson’s work. Historically, they are the daimons of poetic expression and philosophic inquiry (for Sappho and Socrates, it was eros; for Simonides and Plato, alienation). Both occasion pangs of estrangement, but at different emotional poles; both occasion a retreat inward, and a need for a language with which to talk to oneself. The move out of the epic and into the lyric can be interpreted as the takeover of eros and alienation in the poetic imagination: the poet at last falls out of the ecstatic trance and into their own self, as an embodied, thinking, feeling thing, and is forced to step forward and reckon with the curious, agonistic and strange nature of their own existence, with only language to brace themselves. Reading Anne Carson feels a great deal like this.