„Beauty is truth, truth beauty“

… wrote the Romantic poet John Keats in „Ode on a Grecian Urn.“ That famous citation, which expresses 19th-century Romanticism’s trust in feeling over reason, is pertinent in the case of Anne Carson’s newest poetic volume, „The Beauty of the Husband.“

A brief dust jacket note says the book is an essay on Keats’s ideas about beauty and truth. In Ms.Carson’s eerie, elliptical, very beautiful elegy for a failed marriage, the husband represents beauty to be sure, but he also represents not truth but mendacity. THE BEAUTY OF THE HUSBAND. A fictional essay in 29 tangos. By Anne Carson / NYT 17.2.01