Selected Poems of Anthony Hecht

by Anthony Hecht, J.D. McClatchy (Editor)

Alongside Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, and other pillars of twentieth-century poetry, Anthony Hecht joins the Borzoi Poetry series.

Hecht, whose writing rings with the cadences of the King James Bible, and who, as an infantryman at the end of World War II, participated in the liberation of the concentration camps, lived and experienced the best and worst of the twentieth century. Readers of this volume—the first selected poems to be made from Hecht’s seven individual volumes—will be captivated by Hecht’s dark music and allusions to the literature of the past. As J. D. McClatchy explains in his introduction, Hecht was a poet for whom formal elegance was inextricably bound up with the dramatic force, thematic ambition, and powerful emotions in each poem. The rules of his art, which he both honored and transformed, are “moral principles meant finally to reveal the structure of human dilemmas and sympathies.”

This elevated sense of what poetry can accomplish defines our experience of reading Hecht, and will ensure his place in the canon for years to come.

Adam and Eve knew such perfection once,
God’s finger in the cloud, and on the ground
Nothing but springtime, nothing else at all.
But in our fallen state where the blood hunts
For blood, and rises at the hunting sound,
What do we know of lasting since the fall?
Who has not, in the oil and heat of youth,
Thought of the flourishing of the almond tree,
The grasshopper, and the failing of desire,
And thought his tongue might pierce the secrecy
Of the six-pointed starlight, and might choir
A secret-voweled, unutterable truth?
—from “A Poem for Julia”

Genres: Poetry, Literature

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are both places and periods in life
That are tolerable only as transitions;
Hell might consist of staying there forever,
Immobile, never able to depart.
-Anthony Hecht, from "See Naples and Die"

I didn't know quite what to make of Hecht when I was younger. He wasn't in the poetry anthologies of my childhood, and one of my sharpest memories from college was the sense of ashamed ignorance that swept over me when a classmate asserted his love of Hecht on the first day of our freshman poetry class, in response to which the whole room including the teacher loudly murmured their knowing approval. My first exposure to Hecht was through a mix of very opposite things: on the one hand, the clever if rather puerile mugging wherein he indulges in poems like "The Dover Bitch" and "The Ghost in the Martini"; on the other hand, the almost superhumanly sage and stonily bleak prophesying of pieces like "The Book of Yolek." It was hard to reconcile.

It was good, then, to find this book and let it flesh out my impressions of Hecht a bit. The first thing that struck me going in was something I had already suspected: that I was in the presence of a most colossal intelligence, a poet whose wide vocabulary and breadth of reference points testify to his ample erudition. These poems taught me the words for quite a few things I'd previously had experience with but hadn't known the names for: to give just two examples, entrelac (a knitting technique) and cheval glasses (those mirrors that tilt on their frames). Out of such intelligence naturally springs eloquence, a scintillatingly nimble way of mixing the concrete and the abstract, as in a poem where he refers to morning's bright beauty as its "flaxen charities," for example. This is a playful intelligence, one that delightfully rhymes "Louis" with "QE[D]," "couple" with "fribble."

I didn't expect to like the long poems as much as I did, but I ended up feeling that their nuances of mood and characterization gave me a better feel for Hecht's humanity than his shorter pieces -- this was especially the case with "The Grapes" and "The Short End," poems whose empathy for their women protagonists somewhat redeemed Hecht in my eyes for what he did in, say, "The Ghost in the Martini." I was also won over in spite of myself by what he does with the epistolary mode (a mode I don't generally care much for) in poems like "Message From the City" and "A Letter," where he seems to drop all guises and posturing and speak with a vulnerability one can't help feeling for. I didn't love all the poems: "Japan" and "The Odds," for example, seemed to me to suggest that incorporating Asian geopolitics coherently into his worldview was maybe not Hecht's strongest suit. He is better when revisiting the timeless and universal theme of the uneasy coexistence of body and spirit: in an early poem, he tautly aphorizes, "What the intelligence / Works out in pure delight / The body must learn in pain," a thought he reprises later in "The Venetian Vespers" as

O that the soul should tie its shoes, the mind
Should wash its hands in a sink, that a small grain
Of immortality should fit itself
With dentures.

That poem ends, shall we say, not optimistically, but it nonetheless proffers the helpful idea that if anything can provide a reprieve, albeit a temporary one, from the painful conflict of bodily decay and spiritual yearning, it is attentiveness, mindfulness. "To give one's whole attention to such a sight / Is a sort of blessedness," the poem's speaker says, referring to the rain, and later: "I look and look, / As though I could be saved by simply looking." "As though I could": the subjunctive mood here does not convey a confidence-inspiring level of faith, for sure, but it does at least suggest some kind of path we can take forward in these challenging times in which we live. Hecht's verse, in its precise descriptions of subtle plays of light, complex washes of sound, embodies that very attentiveness it prescribes.

[Diann Blakely · Rating 5 out of 5]

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)

[Cooch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four and a half stars

There are half a dozen excellent poems here, some good poems and a few average. His later poems in general are weaker.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never read Mr. Hecht's work before as my familiarity with modern poetry is admittedly not very great. I am actually not positive that Mr. Hecht is a great poet, but the poems are immensely fascinating and enjoyable.

Mr. Hecht is a poet of great technical skill and very fine verbal imagination. This gives his poems dignity. Some of them are masterpieces as "Sacrifice" and "Grapes" and even "The Venetian Vespers". (But whereas "See Naples and Die" is ironically a lot of fun to read, it's also a little like a soap opera. I think that Mr. Hecht verges on this type of melodrama when he uses poems to narrate the stories of various personae, as in "The Venetian Vespers". Poetry that shares a border with short story has always been hard for me.)

Sometimes, I felt that Mr. Hecht's skill restrained the emotional content from emerging and confronting the reader. I suppose this is one of the risks of a rich verbal imagination, a grand imagery, and a facility with form.

Personally, I thought that, by and large, the early and middle poems had far more life and spirit than the later ones. I thought that the latter seemed to be poems of someone "going through the motions". A couple of the later poems ("Saul and David" and "Judith")simply fell flat and I wondered what was their motivation. Another ("The Road to Damascus")was quite shallow. Also, I thought that the little collections with woodcuts ("The Seven Deadly Sins" and the "Death" series) were actually quite dumb and boring.

These poems are definitely worth reading and STUDYING. I recommend them even though my review seems to be somewhat negative.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 3 out of 5]

5 stars for the poems from The Hard Hours; only 1 or 2 for most of the poems selected from his other books. The Hard Hours is Hecht's essential collection; occasionally a poem from another collection will approach the strength of HH, but most of them are more like extremely accomplished exercises than real poems. Some of the later longer poems would function just as well as prose stories. In The Hard Hours Hecht comes face to face with the horrors of his experiences in World War II and other horrors of human history, which makes it often an extremely painful book to read, but it is here that his considerable musical skills serve some purpose other than prettiness. Too often the other books are high-class, high society puff.

[Steven Critelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anthony Hecht is a modern classicist in an age where the mid-20th century is presently remembered for the birth of the Beats and the New York school of poets. There is a gentrified, gentlemanly personality that stands firm at the center of his poetry, which speaks to political and social upheaval that typified his time. Having said that, the patrician in Hecht is nevertheless abundantly creative in the ways he interacts with his readers. His reputation will only increase as the dust clears and poetry lovers take his true measure.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine overview of a great XX-century poet — despite the mediocre printing quality.