{
  "id": 13160682,
  "title": "The Year Anne Carson Changed My Life",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/09/the-year-anne-carson-changed-my-life",
  "topic": "culture",
  "section": "Culture",
  "published": "2026-10-09T16:30:29.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Atlantic",
    "slug": "the-atlantic",
    "url": "https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/10/how-nobel-laureate-anne-carson-changed-writers-life/688949/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "In 2001, the author, a mid-20s graduate student in religion, was feeling uninspired and stagnant in their academic pursuits. Feeling stuck, they decided to take a leave from their doctoral program and begin a new chapter in their life. This included taking a job as a newspaper reporter and auditing an undergraduate poetry class at Yale. The course was taught by the celebrated poet J. D. \"Sandy\" McClatchy, who was known for his resonant voice, infectious love of poetry, and candid, often brutal criticism of students' work.\n\nOne day during the poetry class, McClatchy played a recording of W. H. Auden reading his poem \"The Shield of Achilles.\" The line about the cruel urchin who \"never heard / Of any world where promises are kept\" resonated with the author and inspired them to begin memorizing poetry. They began memorizing a few lines a day, eventually moving on to other poets like Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. Through this process, the author came across Anne Carson's 2000 collection, Men in the Off Hours.\n\nThe author chose to memorize Carson's poem \"First Chaldaic Oracle\" due to its brevity, and they did so within a few days. The poem, which contains fragments of the Chaldean Oracles, challenged the author to think about the concept of \"cherrying\" their mind – a mysterious process that involves learning elusive truths without relying on traditional methods like study, religion, or archaeology. The poem's cryptic language and playful tone, combined with its exploration of the nature of knowledge and understanding, captivated the author and became a source of inspiration and solace.",
  "summary": "In my mid-20s, I was flailing. Then I memorized a baffling poem and learned to stop looking so hard.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}