It is an essay about an essay, and a fiction of self-absorption. The husband folds the poem in upon himself after his wife realizes that she contains the beauty she saw in him. This excessive inwardness is a hallmark of academic poetry, which is a label The Beauty of the Husband does nothing to avoid. It is difficult, sometimes to the point of being alienating, detached from any of the feeling that might have brought its case study to life, and self-consciously intellectual. As with every scholarly effort, there are endnotes explaining the learned allusions.
Poetry is energy and joy.
The Beauty of the Husband is just the form. It is also, for a writer of Carson s reputation, surprisingly uncertain in tone. Poets have always written about poetry, but seldom with less confidence. Poetry is not as popular as it once was, which has had the result of making it introspective and unsure of itself. It is a problem that goes deeper than the increasingly fluid definitions of what poetry is.