The Standard Reader

Anthony Hecht, one of the most elegant and harrowing of American poets, died on October 20 at the age of eighty-one. In an era of lackluster poets, he was uncompromising in his devotion to beauty–a devotion that took forms of such complexity and range, it won him nearly every major award short of the Nobel Prize.

Born in New York in 1923, Hecht was the son of a Jewish businessman whose erratic fortunes produced in the boy at an early age a sense of life’s precariousness. This sense, which runs through all nine of Hecht’s volumes of poetry, was increased by his experience as a young soldier in World War II. Overseas with the 97th Infantry, Hecht saw combat in France, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, participating in the liberation of the concentration camp at Flossenburg just days after the execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While only a handful of Hecht’s poems–including “More Light! More Light!” and “The Book of Yolek”–deal directly with the war, the experience lies beneath everything he wrote, even the later poems of grateful love for his wife, Helen.

Steeped in the literature of the past, Hecht was no imitator but an original voice, both brutal and mordantly funny, matching conscious artifice to an enlarged vision of modern life. His long monologue in the voice of a disturbed ex-soldier, “The Venetian Vespers,” pits the most exquisite descriptive sensibility against an array of horrors. Another narrative, “The Short End,” builds from a surprising familiarity with the dross of American life to a boozy apocalypse. Hecht’s narrative gifts were immense, and he put them to use as well in shorter ironic poems like “The Dover Bitch” and “The Ghost in the Martini.” Blank verse meditations like “Green: An Epistle” and “Apprehensions” question one of the staples of contemporary poetry, autobiographical subject matter: An old song of comparative innocence, / Until one learns to read between the lines.

The style was in many ways the man. I first met Tony Hecht in the early 1980s when I was an aspiring writer in Rochester, New York. I had read Hecht’s books in the public library there, especially his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hard Hours (1967) with its unflinching poems, some of them edged with humor. In a poem about a school friend’s madness, “Third Avenue in Sunlight,” Hecht allowed his speaker an oblique confession of fellowship:

Hecht had seen terrible things but would not succumb to them, and he became one of my heroes among modern poets. When he agreed to meet me in his home and talk about the writing life, I was thrilled and terrified.

Those of us who met Tony only after he had become an established eminence found him formidable. When I entered graduate school at the University of Rochester in 1984, I studied modern poetry with him and attended a few dinners and parties in his home, where Helen was both gracious hostess and heavenly cook. But I held the poet in such esteem that I could never relax around him, and only glimpsed the irreverent humor his older friends, such as W.S. Merwin and Richard Wilbur, would report. When I wrote a dissertation on W.H. Auden, a poet Tony had known and about whom he would write his own critical study, The Hidden Law (1993), I asked Tony to be one of my directors because I knew he would be rigorous. He was. Though he had moved on to Georgetown University in 1985, he co-directed my work by correspondence, sending detailed and erudite letters with gratifying promptness.

Tony performed a similar function for many other scholars and writers. He was a steadfast and voluminous correspondent with such poets as B.H. Fairchild, Dana Gioia, R.S. Gwynn, Brad Leithauser, Timothy Murphy, Mary Jo Salter, Norman Williams, and Greg Williamson. His strictness as a teacher was far outweighed by his generosity to the many different talents he admired.

It was after the war and the failure of his first marriage (his wife left the country with their sons) that Tony found unexpected happiness with Helen D’Alessandro. They married in 1971. Evidence of this love can be found in poems such as “Peripeteia” from Millions of Strange Shadows (1977) and a very recent work called “Aubade”:

The marriage produced a son, Evan, and provided a stable environment that promoted Tony’s late productivity. A poet who at first seemed as parsimonious as Eliot became, like Yeats, prolific at a high level right up to the end. Looking at the body of his work, I can only marvel at the range of characters, forms, moods, and experiences he absorbed into his own magisterial style.

Having studied with John Crowe Ransom and befriended such confessional poets as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, Tony was a writer out of the era of New Criticism who took seriously the close reading of canonical authors. But he was also a reader of voracious and catholic tastes who could champion poets as diverse as Charles Simic and Ron Rash. His own exacting essays were collected in Obbligati (1986), On the Laws of the Poetic Art (1995), and Melodies Unheard (2003). But while this work lumped him with so-called “academic poets” and led to some dismissals of his work, Tony’s intellect and artistry transcend such categories. He exemplified ambition and accomplishment few of his contemporaries could touch.

In an interview at age seventy-five he was happy to quote George Herbert’s “The Flower”: And now in age I bud again, / After so many deaths I live and write. The fact that this blossoming lasted into his eighties is, like Anthony Hecht himself, one of the astonishments of American letters.

With a poet of such stature, the loss felt by his family and friends is painfully mixed with an immense cultural loss that will be felt whenever we read his great poems and judicious essays. Here is a poet who forged his style against all the currents of his age and never slighted his devotions, yet who came in a late poem called “Spring Break” to a more sanguine view of the world he was leaving:

Here is a poet who grew in warmth and humanity right up to his final days. Who is there left now who can question our presumptions with such ferocity and grace?

David Mason is a writer and teacher in Colorado and the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Arrivals.