 First Edition | |
| Author | Anne Carson |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Published | 2001 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Pages | 160 |
| Awards | |
| ISBN | 0375707573 |
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos is a 2001 collection of poetry by Anne Carson that won her the T. S. Eliot Prize.
The Beauty of the Husband includes narrative verse that describes erotic, painful, and heartbreaking scenes from a doomed marriage. A tango (like a marriage) is something you have to dance to the end. The essay traces the development from adolescent fixation to post-divorce adult fixation, and begins when the main character's mother insists that the male subject is not to be trusted. The grandfather of the male subject mentions that under no circumstances should she marry his grandson, whom he calls "tragikos" – a word meaning either tragic or goat. [1] The decades-long doomed relationship that follows features betrayal, adultery, separation, and sensuality, and is marked by prophecy, disillusionment, and poignancy.
Carson's essay is a powerful, moving, and often wryly amusing exploration of how people become the victims of desires they cannot control. The 29 "tangos" are titled and numbered sections of long lines which alternate with much shorter lines to suggest the movements of tango dancers. There is also a thirtieth entry by the husband.
The essay is dedicated to John Keats, "for his general surrender to beauty." In his "Ode on a Grecian Urn", Keats concludes that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Each section in the essay begins with a quote from Keats, and the collection as a whole is framed by his aphorism "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty". [2]
Carson, though an accomplished and celebrated writer, has previously mentioned that at heart she considers herself a visual, not verbal, artist. She has noted that she feels books never fully exhaust her ideas. [3] Love and beauty are some of the concepts explored in different ways by Carson in several of her works. She also translates and teaches Ancient Greek.
According to Book Marks, the book received "rave" reviews based on four critic reviews, with four being "rave". [4]
The Beauty of the Husband won Carson the T. S. Eliot Prize on her third consecutive nomination in 2001, [5] making her the first woman to be awarded this honour. [6] That same year, the book won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, [7] and the Quebec Writers' Federation Award – A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry. [8] It was also a finalist for the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. [9]
Daphne Merkin, writing for the New York Times Book Review , called Anne Carson "one of the great pasticheurs", and said of The Beauty of the Husband: "I don’t think there has been a book since Robert Lowell's Life Studies that has advanced the art of poetry quite as radically as Anne Carson is in the process of doing". [10]
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). As with Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside. Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
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