Our Bar For Great Writing Has Never Been Lower

Canadian writer and poet Anne Carson won the Nobel Prize in Literature last week. I'll admit, my initial impression of the news was more positive than not. Carson's Wikipedia page, for one, paints her as a serious literary scholar versed in the likes of Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf. In a viral interview with the New Yorker, she even states that she doesn't read contemporary novels — because she's a classicist, she reads old books.

For a moment, I thought we'd finally identified a rare anomaly in the literary world: an educated writer who cares more about preserving the literary tradition rather than destroying it outright. Then I read Anne Carson's poetry, and, boy, was I disappointed. Carson is not the profound literary voice I expected her to be; in fact, I hesitate to call her voice "literary" at all...