The most Shakespearean poet of America’s twentieth century, Anthony Hecht wrote his best work while raging on history’s wind-scarred heath. More personally, he saw first-hand the world’s “brute, inexplicable inequities” as a soldier present at an Auschwitz annex’s liberation, then as a helplessly caring and overburdened husband trapped in domestic wars. If chronicled earlier, and starkly, in “See Naples and Die,” which editor McClatchy calls “spooky” in his excellent introduction / overview, Philip Hoy’s ANTHONY HECHT: IN CONVERSATION (Waywiser Press), offers further evidence of Hecht’s lifelong, similarly dual role in two landscapes of carnage, both external yet profoundly internalized: witness and participant.

Though the closest approximation to a memoir by this unassailably great poet and profoundly generous teacher is now available through Hoy, not even the most thorough reading can answer an impenetrable question--how to survive an unloving partnership’s daily attrition? Calls-to-arms for some poets, sadness and agitation, Hecht states clearly, rendered him unable to write except for a few “miracle[s],” thus it’s little wonder that his best work came about during his joyous second marriage to a highly intelligent, dignified, and artistic woman. With the light of her love guiding his way, Hecht was able to penetrate both his and our century’s darkest places in THE VENETIAN VESPERS (1979) and subsequent collections.

Not that riches don’t gleam through McClatchy’s judicious selection: “A Hill,” “More Light! More Light!,” “The Deodand,” “The Book of Yolek,” “Là-Bas: A Trance,” and, of course, “See Naples and Die” constitute a mere half-dozen of those lightning-strikes, Jarrell famously stated, for which all poets spent their lives praying in thunderstorms. Yet the last poem mentioned serves as a perfect objective-correlative to cite in a brief review, especially when also taking into account Hecht’s time in Italy; his reading of OTHELLO--a recurrent figure in not only his canon, but, through him, American poetry’s--in OBBLIGATO, which, to expand, is informed by Hecht’s military experience and his “otherness,” i.e. his Judaism; and his understanding of how personal and historical savagery can collide.

Furthermore, “See Naples and Die” retains a central place because so many influences commingle yet are thoroughly assimilated in a way that no poet since Eliot has been able to manage; in fact, it’s not pushing a point to argue that this work is Hecht’s version of THE WASTE LAND: marriage refracted onto history, both proving mutually illuminating--or shadow-filled. On a supposedly cheering excursion to various sites of antiquity, each proving more ghastly than the previous and including the Cumaean Sibyl’s cave, a guide, “Raimondo” (“remains”? “remuneration”?) steers the speaker and his wife to the Elysian Fields. What peace and radiant promise the very locale invokes, and yet--

"It was a vacant wilderness of weeds,
Thistles and mulberries, with here and there
Poplars quite shadeless; thick, ramshackle patches
Of amaranth, tousled by vines.
The wild, ungoverned growth, this worthless, thick,
And unsuppressible fecundity
Was dotted with a scattering of graves..."

--one half-expects bats with baby faces to crawl down their stones. Unlike Eliot, however, Hecht was no more the abandoning husband than he was Shakespeare’s murderous general: protective of his first wife, Hecht also brings Henry James to mind in his lifelong, uncanny empathy for women that existed side-by-side with a full knowledge of the female capacity for cruelty. Perhaps more will come to light, so to speak, when Johns Hopkins publishes the letters, but for now, we have a brief excerpt quoted by David Yezzi in another superb introduction, this to a handful of Hecht’s unpublished poems that appeared in the September 2011 issue of POETRY. A year after his wedding, Patricia Harris returned from Italy without her husband, and with kindness, candor yet that same continuous, belief-defying empathy, Hecht writes his father:

"Please try to be gentle with Pat when you see her. She is very sick and she knows it, but tries hard to forget it most of the time. I hope she will want to try to do something about it."

Surely this explains why Hecht writes of a woman as famously--if understandably--difficult as Sylvia Plath, his colleague in the mid-fifties at Smith, with such warmth and respect. Plath couldn’t understand why the Hechts so rarely accepted her dinner invitations and never reciprocated. She was desperate to fit in, and even more desperate for Ted Hughes to be happy in her homelands. But Hecht, while teaching full-time and trying to write, was desperate too, for, in addition, he found himself forced to take on the role of single parent. Handling laundry, cooking, shopping, diapers, and an unstable wife surely proved overwhelming, particularly given Hecht’s mannerliness, which would have made him fear both spousal outbursts and, knowing of Plath’s early breakdown, potential damage to her own delicate psyche even had unsolicited confidences taken place between classes, whispered at corner tables over coffee. On the other hand, a highly intuitive woman who later described herself as a possible Jew naturally would have reached out to someone else she perceived an outsider.

Yet, to invoke James again, what atrocities manners can inflict, particularly in an era when emotional disturbances were hardly understood by even the most highly educated, for this seemingly incongruent pair would have taken each other’s situation to the heart’s core. What they spoke of can only be guessed, but given the Shoah imagery that permeates their respective canons, the speculations remain fascinating and endless. While in Hecht, such tropes appear in his earliest poems, published and unpublished, we read neither of rising smoke, lampshades made of human skin, or “brute black boot[s],” such as those worn by the SS, until the Ariel poems, i.e. many years later. But might Hecht have described Flossenburg, the Auschwitz annex, with Plath? Spoken of Racine, a playwright they both loved and who makes an appearance in “The Deodand,” whereas “Grand Guignol” is a term Hecht uses and one often employed to describe the psychodramas of Plath’s most notorious poems?

Or did Hecht and Plath talk of Shakespeare? From their first earliest days together, the Bard-soaked Hughes--who remained a friend--placed Plath on a regimen of reading all thirty-odd plays, and like Hecht, to quote Baron Wormser, and unlike the typical American poet, whose once-scratched surface reveals a social progressive, “Plath...knew the Furies.” Hecht’s enormity of soul wouldn’t judge either his first wife or Plath; indeed, this very quality gave him a knowledge that most men, particularly those plummeted into his circumstances, never attain: this world is harsher for women, the smaller and more vulnerable animal.

Speaking of animals, Hecht’s re-emergence onto America’s “poetry scene”--a notion of which he was profoundly scornful--occurred simultaneously with the soi-disant Neo-Formalist movement’s apex, when our most prestigious journals were printing arch poems detailing cats’ various charms. Or, switching from fauna to flora, the delights of Japanese gardens. Despite the unfortunate timing, Hecht’s career as a poet, essayist, and teacher was already indisputably, even singularly known by the cognoscenti, but his very mastery in received forms, and his lighter side (once again, think Shakespeare’s comedies or perhaps “Dover Bitch”), made him ripe for appropriation as general-in-command for those deft with meter and rhyme but lacking Hecht’s hard-earned rigor, gravity, and chiaroscuro. How he loathed association even with the term “formalism”: only someone who’d seen human nature at its worst could pull off the delicate, poignant love poems for his widow, who knew him better than anyone. Indeed, were he alive now, only his delight in her would have surpassed the twinkle in his eye sparkling by the nightly news’s coverage of the Occupy movement, especially since Hecht also detested what he called “the creative writing industry.” Not that he would have joined the drummers clustered near the White House, of course. Hecht would have been writing poems, as was his custom: “We were there // We suffered, we were Whitman.” But if ignorance weren’t sadly widespread, even fashionable, what better candidate for the Poet Laureate of Occupy DC?

Few could withstand such a reference without being trivialized or made too “of the moment.” But Hecht, who wrote that “space must be made for all ephemera,” deployed the Keystone Kops, the A & P, and Pinocchio, thus he’d surely present no objection except to those too lazy to cyber-click for less topical references to Bellini, Charon, and Simone Weil.

As to why formal concerns are crucial, here’s a ready answer: a person not particularly good at memorization has had the entire passage excerpted from “See Naples and Die” for almost twenty years, while the only free verse poem—THE WASTE LAND has its vers libre parts but can hardly be said to count in this context—“got by heart,” as the British and Irish say, is William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Given a choice between “a machine made out of words” and Word itself, perhaps supplying a deus ex machina, there’s no question which this reviewer would choose. Or which has chosen her.

(published as a featured review in PLEIADES, Summer 2012, Vol. 32, No. 2)