Anthony Hecht at Eighty

THE EYE, self-satisfied, will be misled, says the monologuist in Anthony Hecht’s “The Transparent Man,” Thinking the puzzle solved, supposing at last / It can look forth and comprehend the world. High ambition and high achievement have faded in American poetry, but they will not disappear while Hecht lives. Eighty this year, he has just published “Collected Later Poems,” the complete texts of his three most recent volumes of verse, and “Melodies Unheard,” a gathering of essays.

Most readers remember him primarily as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a few dark but frequently anthologized poems such as “More Light! More Light!” or “A Hill”:

Or perhaps such lighter fare as “The Dover Bitch,” which imagines what the woman in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” was thinking while Arnold bemoaned to her the loss of faith and the decay of things:

But Hecht is more than our resident misanthrope. He is one of the great synthesizers of the modern moment, a visionary poet capable of conveying private experience in public forms. He is formidable, to be sure, allusive and self-consciously literary in style, but he remains utterly above the triviality of much contemporary poetry, and he mixes opulence with an uncompromising and complex moral vision. At a time when poets are happy to clown for any crowd that will so much as notice them, Hecht remains defiantly difficult, offering pleasures of the sort one might derive from the novels of Henry James, the essays of John Ruskin, the paintings of Tiepolo.

BORN IN 1923, Anthony Hecht grew up in New York, the son of a businessman whose fortunes rose and fell so precipitously that family life was constantly imploding. Hints of these early years can be found in poems like “Green: An Epistle” and “Apprehensions.” In an interview with Philip Hoy he observed his family’s mixture of pride and shame at their Jewish heritage, his brother Roger’s epilepsy and other ailments, and a general state of unhappiness throughout childhood.

He had a good schooling, however, attending Bard College before being drafted at twenty (his bachelor’s degree was awarded in absentia). Overseas with the 97th Infantry, Hecht saw combat in France, Germany, and Czechoslovakia, participating in the liberation of a concentration camp at Flossenburg, where Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been murdered just days earlier: “The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking.” Always inclined to seek aesthetic compensations for the pains of reality, he would find in this experience and in decades of later reflection the blunt truth underlying all of his poems: Life is so cruel, our sanity so tenuous, that any help offered by art and love is to be cherished beyond measure.

HIS OLDEST FRIENDS remember him for his rollicking sense of humor, as the fellow who used to recite swatches of Milton’s “Lycidas” in a W.C. Fields accent, and the humor appears in such work as “The Ghost in the Martini,” a politically incorrect lyric about the male libido at work, which heightens the comedy by having the man’s conscience speak from his drink as he is trying to seduce a younger woman.

But there’s no denying his melancholy, or his confrontation with brutal reality even while he often expresses a Yeatsian desire for escape from that reality. Among the events that set him on his melancholic course was the failure of his first marriage. In 1959, Hecht’s wife left with their two young sons, and he fell into a depression requiring hospitalization and a course of Thorazine. Many of Hecht’s friends, including Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, had intimate experience of madness. Yet Hecht retained a survivor’s instinct these poets lacked. Although he would never have predicted this for himself, his life has been a movement toward health and a greater equilibrium than the mad mid-century poets enjoyed. Hecht’s immense sadness at the divorce can be felt in poems like “A Letter” and “Adam”:

But Hecht never swoons with self-pity as the confessional poets were wont to do. The story of his life as a man and poet is of the consistent dignity and mastery of his work, the happiness of his second marriage, the honors heaped on his head, the gradual waning of temperamental mood-swings, and the solidifying of poetic command. This has happened, of course, in a literary climate that generally lacks the patience to understand a writer of complexity. With all his successes, Hecht has not yet been read as the major figure he is.

He had a stable academic career, teaching for many years at the University of Rochester and finishing at Georgetown. Along the way, Hecht has published seven volumes of verse, beginning with “A Summoning of Stones” in 1954, a sometimes ornamental book that was respectfully reviewed and went quickly out of print. More than a dozen difficult and formative years passed before he published “The Hard Hours” (1967), which generally displayed a tougher style and brought Hecht the Pulitzer. This was followed a decade later by “Millions of Strange Shadows,” another flawless collection, then with relative speed “The Venetian Vespers” (1979). Those three volumes–gathered in the 1990 “Collected Earlier Poems”–are enough to assure his place in American literature.

But Hecht went on to publish “The Transparent Man” (1990), “Flight Among the Tombs” (1996), and “The Darkness and the Light” (2001). Clearly, something more than bile and misanthropy has kept him alive. Compensatory and self-protective, Hecht’s erudition, including his deep familiarity with the Bible, is part of the fabric of his poetry. Among literary influences one can easily identify Horace, Shakespeare, Milton, Baudelaire, Eliot, Auden, and John Crowe Ransom, his postwar teacher when he was on the G.I. Bill at Kenyon College. The resulting style can be elevated, to put it mildly, but as Hecht has noted, “any flamboyance is likely to be confronted or opposed by counter-force, directness, elemental grit.”

THE MOST OBVIOUS manifestation of this doubleness is in Hecht’s technique of juxtaposition. His much-anthologized Holocaust poem, “More Light! More Light!” begins with a scene of a long-ago execution–three gruesome stanzas about a man being burnt at the stake. Then the poet makes a simple transition to World War II:

Other poets have given us feasts of gratuitous horror from conflicts of one sort or another, but Hecht’s tonal control lifts these lines to monumental power. In his early volumes a number of lyrics and meditative sequences arise from experience of war and the Holocaust: The contemplation of horror is not edifying, Hecht avows in “Rites and Ceremonies.” Neither does it strengthen the soul. It is, however, not to be wished away. “Collected Later Poems” contains fewer such poems, but at least one, “The Book of Yolek,” rises to a level of greatness through this technique of juxtaposition.

Great sestinas are rare; the form works by repeating the same six line-endings in an elaborate pattern for six stanzas and a three-line coda. Hecht had already published a fine comedy in his “Sestina d’Inverno,” but “The Book of Yolek” begins with a meal Of grilled brook trout and an after-dinner walk, at which point

As the poem progresses, the end word “to” is varied as “1942” and then “tattoo” when another sort of camp is recalled, another manner of being lost, and another child: Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn’t a day / Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal / And shamble between armed guards to his long home. The poem concludes:

The juxtaposition of civility and horror is particularly Hechtian. The same sort of juxtaposition is on display in “A Hill,” or in the humor and madness of “Third Avenue in Sunlight,” or the mystery and manners of his poem about youthful sex, “The End of the Weekend.” The title of “Millions of Strange Shadows” derives from Shakespeare’s sonnet: What is your substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you tend? And yet, despite the skepticism about appearance and reality throughout his work, the book is dedicated to Hecht’s second wife, Helen, a presence in his happiest poems.

HECHT ALSO HAS a talent for dramatic monologue. In “Peripeteia” (Aristotle’s term for the turn of a tragic plot), Hecht’s speaker begins in a theater with the familiar rustling of programs, / My hair mussed from behind by a grand gesture / Of mink. “Peripeteia” warns us about illusions while assenting to what might be illusory, too: the love of that dream girl stepping off the stage. The poem is both an elaborate valentine to his wife and a wink and a nod to the rest of us.

Meanwhile, the title poem of “The Venetian Vespers” has an unnamed protagonist who shares some of Hecht’s war experience as well as his painterly use of words. This highly unstable speaker, uncertain even of his own origins, ends up clinging to the visible world–The soul being drenched in fine particulars–as if for salvation.

The critic Gregory Dowling has shown in a brilliant essay how Hecht’s elevated diction undercuts its own authority: “The poem is not only the monologue of a deeply troubled and self-questioning man, it is also an exploration of the triumphs and limits of language–and, in particular, of ‘the high style.’ And it is no accident that the poet has chosen a city that is both a triumph of self-glorifying splendor and an emblem of worldly decay for this exploration.”

When Hecht chooses protagonists further removed from himself, he disturbs a kind of naturalistic decorum in which we are accustomed to fewer stylistic flourishes. Reading such poems as “The Grapes” and “The Short End,” I find myself torn between distaste for the condescension in Hecht’s handling of lower-class subjects and pleasure in the brilliant writing.

Hecht’s facility with multiple poetic modes–lyrics, meditations, narratives, satires, and dramatic poems–continues in “Collected Later Poems.” In “The Transparent Man” two extended monologues, the title poem and “See Naples and Die,” anchor the book with their fictional detail. If neither poem is quite so ambitious or moving as “The Venetian Vespers,” each reconfirms Hecht’s psychological range. “A Love for Four Voices,” in which the young lovers from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” make delightful speeches, now seems to me a successful Mozartian romp. Here Hecht indulges his affection for the Baroque, including such words as “cabochons” and “ipseity.” If there is any moral to this masque, perhaps it lies in a couplet spoken by Helena, observing that If life is brief, . . . sex is even briefer, / Its joys like the illusions of a reefer.

HECHT’S VISION has always had its moral aspect. The very authority and immodesty of his style is, in effect, a manifestation of his mistrust of conventional cant, part of his devotion to imaginative freedom even while accepting the restraints of rhetoric and poetic form. There’s something anarchic in Hecht’s vision that oddly verges on the surreal, but it’s all so stylized and seemingly genteel that it sneaks up on you. He is a mannerist with good manners.

“The Presumptions of Death” is a sequence treating Hecht’s darker obsessions with brutal whimsy or arch civility, each poem accompanied by a woodcut from Leonard Baskin. Another poem, “The Mysteries of Caesar,” portrays the closeted homosexuality of a Latin teacher. Still another high point in this volume is “Proust on Skates,” imagining the utterly refined and isolated novelist enjoying ordinary sport. In “Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-Seven,” the poet’s birthday gift to himself, Hecht speaks for anyone who has survived to old age:

Not every poet of Hecht’s generation has taken seriously the responsibility to evaluate the work of others, living and dead. His previous books of criticism include “Obbligati,” “The Hidden Law” (about W.H. Auden), and “On the Laws of Poetic Art” (a series of Mellon lectures). Those books display thorough erudition, a willingness at times to belabor a point, and a gentrified style that has not been to the taste of his detractors.

“Melodies Unheard,” his new collection of essays, surveys writers from Shakespeare to Charles Simic, the latter an unexpected but fortuitous taste of Hecht’s, showing us his ability to locate what Marianne Moore called “the genuine” in a variety of poets. His introduction has useful things to say about the practice of poetry, but also establishes his principles of criticism. He values formal command, but he does not assume it exists in a vacuum. His broad reading and years of classroom lecturing cause him to place literature in the context of all the learning and experience he can muster–which turns out to be quite a lot. He even chastises two former masters of his, William Empson and W.H. Auden, for lapses in their criticism. About a passage in Auden’s lectures on Shakespeare, Hecht concludes, “This is ingenious, artful, and not altogether to be trusted.” Throughout the book one finds Hecht appreciating “fine particulars” in poetry, dispraising poems with professional expertise, taking care to make his own taste part of his discussions.

What Hecht once wrote for his dead friend Joseph Brodsky might well be said about Hecht himself:

Hecht’s grand style–partly built upon revulsion at the worst humanity has to offer, partly upon the true poet’s love of words and word-shapes–exists at a time when ornament of any sort is greeted with scorn or indifference. No other poet of Hecht’s generation has given us such a range of characters, forms, elaborate and brutal forcefulness, yoking Europe and America in their joint experiences of art, war, and the “wilderness of comfort” that is often ordinary life. No other poet in English has fashioned such disillusioned beauty.

David Mason is the author of “The Country I Remember” and teaches English at the Colorado College.