Anne Carson’s Seductive Strangeness

Anne Carson, who won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature today, doesn’t write masterpieces or door-stoppers, and she has no interest in emulating the great works of the past—including those of past laureates.

Despite her training as a classicist and her celebrated skill as a translator, she would likely have little to say about the authenticity of film adaptations of The Odyssey .

Carson is a poet by trade, but she’s really an archaeologist of sorts, sifting through the pottery shards of culture and letting the light of our own time illuminate their beauty.

Carson prefers to use fragments as seeds for her own poetry, and the high-cultural touchpoints for her lyrics and critical essays—Sappho, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Michelangelo Antonioni, Simone Weil—sometimes give her work an air of forbidding experimentation that quickly turns, upon reading, into pleasure and delight.

You may not know or care who Heloïse and Abelard are, but I can promise that you will enjoy reading them argue in a hotel room in the middle of her 2005 “spoken-word opera,” Decreation .

Across roughly two dozen translations and original books, a twee-punk “don’t give a damn” attitude pervades Carson’s reinterpretation of ancient texts: Her poetry shuns obeisance to tradition and literality and embraces creative fantasy instead.

For that reason, the barrier to entry for her poetry is surprisingly low—surprisingly, I mean, for a poet whose books often contain a page or two of footnotes.

Carson wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the ancient poet Sappho at the University of Toronto, in the city where she was born in 1950.

When I was a classics major in college, her 1998 re-creation of a bit of obscure Greek mythology, Autobiography of Red , was a cult object.

Some of her poetry isn’t even poetry at all, but a mix of essays, screenplays, even the odd oratorio.

Nox , her 2010 elegy for her brother—the title is Latin for “night”—arrives in a box and unfolds like an accordion.

Carson’s predilection for the classics doesn’t domesticate them; it riffs on how astonishingly strange it can be to put words down on a page (or papyrus) in a meaningful order, and to try to have them capture the human condition. [ Read: The best American poetry of the 21st century (so far) ] Sappho , Carson’s early subject, offers an important clue as to why her work matters to us now, and perhaps also as to why she won the Nobel.

Sappho’s poetry has survived only in bits and pieces, and her form of writing, as much as her obsession with love and longing, has inspired Carson’s own iconoclastic, restless tacking among genres.

Yet Carson is averse to the common assumption that we have to look for what’s directly relatable in the past in order to fall in love with it.