Anne Carson, the Canadian poet, has been named as the 2026 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. For those unfamiliar with Carson’s work, it is a real testimony to the age we are in. The absence of form and clear meaning, combined with a meandering stream of consciousness, unsettles the soul so successfully that it leaves little doubt that the effect is intentional.
The New Yorker recently shared this news on X/Twitter alongside a poem of hers from 2001 called “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions” – in it, she writes: “My personal poetry is a failure.” I do not highlight this rather self-aware admission in a spirit of mockery, but rather to call out something I believe has become endemic within art, namely ugliness. Masked in the specious claim that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there has been a concerted effort to put into the beholder’s eye anything but what is really beautiful. I do not think Carson’s poetry is a failure by accident; I think it is the intended outcome – it is successful because it is a failure.
