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| Illustration by Courtney Wotherspoon |
Is Anne Carson the First Poet with More Fans than Readers?
Her abstruse, down-tuned music is the soundtrack to poetry’s institutionalized life in the twenty-first century
BY MICHAEL LISTAILLUSTRATION BY COURTNEY WOTHERSPOON
Updated 14:27, Apr. 1, 2020 | Published 9:30, Sep. 23, 2016
IN 1986, a Canadian classics professor named Anne Carson published Eros the Bittersweet, a collection of erudite essays about love. It was an unusual book for an academic, in that it reflected the half-mad presumption that someone, somewhere might be reading it for fun. “It was Sappho who first called Eros ‘bittersweet,’” Carson writes. “No one who has been in love disputes her.”
