Reader's Digest: May 11, 2024

In last week’s TLS: the incomparable A. E. Stallings on the incomparable Anne Carson. Stallings captures Carson’s style with an imponderable clause—

Lyrical as a critic, scholarly as a poet

—two meanings in superposition: Carson as lyrical critic and scholarly poet; Carson, as lyrical as a critic, as scholarly as a poet.

This verbal chaos is characteristic of Carson herself, according to Stallings:

[Her] own scholarship can be so disarming and so madcap in its juxtapositions, wearing its learning as lightly as a helium balloon on the wrist, that when reading it one forgets what scholarship in the wild usually looks and sounds like.

A certain kind of highbrow reader—or someone who aspires to be—will love Anne Carson, starting with her lyrical book of scholarship, Eros the Bittersweet, and then her poems in verse and prose.

Not everyone approves. Stallings’ essay led me to a critical review of Carson by a cynic, Michael Lista, who does not. “For fans of Eros,” he writes, “discovering that Car…