SOURCE: Burt, John. “Notes on Some Recent Poetry.” Southern Review 37, no. 4 (autumn 2001): 836-50.

In the following excerpt, Burt asserts that The Beauty of the Husband, although not Carson's strongest work, is a “savvy and interesting” collection.

Anne Carson earned her reputation as one of the most inventive and intelligent contemporary poets with Autobiography of Red (1998), in which classical mythology, the problems of romantic disappointment, and impish scholarship interwove to bind together a volume that is at once tartly idiosyncratic and learned in the byways and blind alleys of the life of the feelings. Had Autobiography of Red not existed, The Beauty of the Husband would seem a triumphant book. But what were innovations in the earlier book seem mannerisms or repetitions in the later one. The use Carson makes of quotations from Keats's minor work, which separate the sections of the poem, seems a derivative reprise of the...