A Poet of His Time, for Better and Worse

COLLECTED POEMS: Including Late and Uncollected Work, by Anthony Hecht. Edited by Philip Hoy.

LATE ROMANCE: Anthony Hecht — A Poet’s Life, by David Yezzi

To write about the poet Anthony Hecht in 2024 is to invite the question of why, in 2024, anyone is writing about the poet Anthony Hecht. His work is so wildly out of step with contemporary practice that it seems almost to come from another, possibly fictional timeline — one in which poets could recite long passages from “Lycidas” from memory and would, of their own free will, be photographed wearing bow ties.

A typical Hecht poem will revolve around a cultural reference that the average reader has barely heard of, like the Witch of Endor, who raises the spirit of the prophet Samuel in the Old Testament. Will that poem be a sonnet? Oh yes. Will that sonnet adhere strictly to the form, including a blank line between the octet and the sestet? Oh yes. Will it quote Shakespeare? Oh yes. Will it involve the words “sortilege” and “thaumaturges”? You bet. Will its last line include the word “engastrimythic” (which means “ventriloquized”)? Yes, and it should be noted that Microsoft Word’s spell-check refuses to recognize this adjective, as if technology itself were saying, “Anthony Hecht, did you write this poem with a quill, or what?”

At this point, you may be wondering whether this review will be eight paragraphs of eye-rolling. Or you may be wondering whether the field will be reversed, and the unexpected merit of lines tricked out with words like “engastrimythic” will become clear. Neither of these things will happen. Hecht’s career is emblematic of a tension at the core of poetry — especially poetry in the United States — and that tension deserves explanation and sympathetic understanding.

Both enterprises are aided by a couple of new books. The first is Hecht’s “Collected Poems,” edited by Philip Hoy, which includes all seven of his individual collections in order (always the best way to present a poet), as well as a handful of poems published in a posthumous volume and some uncollected work. The other is “Late Romance: Anthony Hecht — A Poet’s Life,” a biography by the poet and critic David Yezzi that delivers the desired curiosities (Hecht was once warned about the perils of a life in poetry by Dr. Seuss! He once stole a girl from a young Marlon Brando!) while maintaining a gratifying focus on the poetry.

Hecht, who died in 2004, is usually tagged with words like “mandarin” and “formalist” and grouped into a cadre of American poets born in the 1920s that includes Richard Wilbur and James Merrill. But in many ways, Hecht was different. He was Jewish, for one thing, an identity that, when Hecht was a young man, was fraught not only in the world of American literature (then under the spell of T.S. Eliot), but in many of the country’s elite spaces. As Yezzi notes, when Hecht was preparing to attend Bard, his father suggested he “change his name to something less Jewish sounding, to avoid discrimination.”

The Second World War was the lodestone of Hecht’s poetry, if not his life. He served in combat units but deliberately never shot at anyone, a decision that gave him, as Yezzi writes, “an excruciating sense of moral compromise.” Because of his language skills, Hecht was assigned to translate interviews after the liberation of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Yezzi quotes a letter Hecht wrote to his parents: “What I have seen and heard here, in conversations with Germans, French, Czechs and Russians — plus personal observations — combines to make a story well beyond the limits of censorship regulations. You must wait till I can tell you personally of this beautiful country and its demented people.”

The poems that stemmed from this horrific experience are the ones typically reproduced in anthologies, particularly “‘More Light! More Light!’,” which quotes words attributed to Goethe on his deathbed. Extreme subjects don’t always have to be paired with extreme forms or diction — poetry isn’t a toddler’s shape sorter — but it’s hard to read this work today without feeling a sense of mismatch, as grim scenes are delivered in filigreed writing. If a gun is about to be used to murder someone, it will have “hovered lightly in its glove.” If a bunch of killers are loitering, they will “lounge in a studied mimicry of ease.” If a poem is exploring the history of European violence, we will also have a “timbered hill,” “blue shadows” and “the crisp light of winter.”

Hecht’s best work allows his fluent intelligence to enter the scene, rather than to draw its curtains. This is notable in less dire poems like “Peripeteia,” but also in perhaps his best poem, “A Hill.” The speaker (figured as Hecht himself) is chatting comfortably with friends in a marketplace when abruptly, for no reason, the market vanishes and

The vision of the hill ends, the market returns, but “for more than a week/I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen.” The betrayal in “‘More Light! More Light!’” is that when light is called for, no light appears. Here, the same lack of response seems bleaker, because there’s no betrayal at all — this is simply how things are. “At least I was not alone.” But he is alone; he’s always been alone.

This sense of aloneness — of loneliness, really — is the theme that runs through Hecht’s strongest writing and through Yezzi’s biography. Yezzi is alert to it: At one point he quotes the poet and critic Richard Howard, who remarks, “Tony always wanted to be a member of the club.” This longing was evident even in Hecht’s speaking voice, for which he cultivated a ludicrously plummy accent that made him sound like Benedict Cumberbatch. When Hecht was inducted into what is now the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he altered his suits, Yezzi notes, so that he could wear “the badge of membership, a ‘gaudy rosette,’ in his buttonhole.” It’s hard to know whether to feel depressed, charmed or faintly embarrassed by this revelation.

But all those responses apply equally to poetry itself. The question for poets is always, “How do I write poetry?” — and for a long time, the answer, provided in part by Eliot, was, “By knowing a lot about poetic tradition and making a show of it.” It’s not the most obvious answer (the more one thinks about it, the stranger it seems). But for Hecht’s generation, it was a reliable answer that led to measurable rewards, and it did so because a cohort of poets, editors and critics agreed that it would. This is the nature and temptation of period style: It offers a way to write and also a way to be seen as a writer, to be “a member of the club.”

Yet the question “How do I write poetry?” and the question “How can I be seen and respected as a poet?” aren’t the same. In fact, they’re frequently in tension, because the preferences of the “club” are so twisted by that group’s tiny size and self-dealing that to satisfy them often says more about acceptability than artistry. Each club — and American poetry has had many — praises its members’ small, speech-imitating creations, and yet suddenly, inevitably, the cold hill appears, and your fellow engastrimyths vanish along with their talking dolls. What speaks instead then is the empty air, and what it says is: “You’re alone. How do you feel about that?”

COLLECTED POEMS: Including Late and Uncollected Work | By Anthony Hecht | Edited by Philip Hoy | Knopf | 611 pp. | $50

LATE ROMANCE: Anthony Hecht — A Poet’s Life | By David Yezzi | St. Martin’s | 469 pp. | $40