For admirers of the poet Anthony Hecht, a comprehensive narrative of his life and career is a very welcome work. Hecht’s biographer, David Yezzi, deserves both admiration and appreciation for taking on the task. A poet and teacher of some distinction, Yezzi has certainly done due diligence for his decade-long project. But as readers of work dating back 50 years or so, what are the reasons for our continued admiration? What are the poet’s distinctive qualities? Why should we continue to care about Hecht’s poems, works that are the product of poetic approaches hardly in style at the moment?
“No poet of the twentieth century has better expressed the trauma to the American psyche caused by the Second World War,” proposes Yezzi in his introduction. Hecht had considerable personal traumas to draw on. After early years of New York City privilege (despite the Depression) and a history of his father’s (and his own subsequent) nervous breakdowns, Hecht served as a soldier at the very end of WWII. Coming as he did from a fully assimilated, nonreligious household, the war forced him to address the historical implications and larger responsibilites of what it was to be an American Jew.
Two moments of great trauma had their effect. The first was as witness to the American gunning down of German women and children waving white flags outside a small town in the Ruhr Valley. This was followed by his presence at the liberation of the concentration camp at Flossenbürg, only an hour away from his Jewish great-grandfather’s hometown. Understandably, Hecht suffered from a lifetime of PTSD, his wartime experiences recreated and alluded to in series after series of haunted poems.
Such traumas form the backbone of Yezzi’s narrative. It is clearly a narrative arc that Hecht himself later presented, particularly in his book-length interview with Philip Hoy. I could quibble with Yezzi’s assertion that no other Jewish-American poet of Hecht’s generation better addressed the subject of the WWII. Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen, as two examples, are poets whose works have grown increasingly influential in the 21st century. Nevertheless, there may be something to Yezzi’s formulation that “no American has expressed such traumas so exquisitely.” This may well be so.
What determines that quality of “exquisite” is obviously subjective. But I wouldn’t disagree with Yezzi on this point in a more general way. In Hecht’s oeuvre we find some of the most beautifully wrought lines by a 20th century poet, lines that exhibit a handling of psychic darkness no American has done better. His is the work of a tormented and tormenting soul — with lines as disturbing and violent as the most explicit cinema. In “To a Madonna,” from his masterful The Hard Hours (1967), Hecht channels Baudelaire, addressing not only the ex-voto in question but his reader:
I
Shall mix my love with murderous savagery,
And like a circus knife-thrower, I’ll aim
At the pure center of your gentle frame,
And plunge those blades into your beating heart,
Your bleeding, suffering, palpitating heart.
But this Caravaggio-esque skillfulness is not just a matter of technique born from trauma but must also be attributed to the influence and experience of Italy. Italian culture manifests in various ways, not only as an extension of “the classical tradition” (though there is much of that), but as temperamental leaning. Rome, Ostia Antica, Ischia, Venice: these in Hecht are not only places to visit but visions and states of mind to inhabit. From The Venetian Vespers (1979):
Ho fatto un fiasco, which is to say,
I’ve made a sort of bottle of my life,
A frangible and transparent failure.
My efforts at their best are negative:
A poor attempt not to hurt anyone,
A goal which, in the very nature of things,
Is ludicrous because impossible.
Viscid, contaminate, dynastic wastes
Flood through the dark canals, the underpasses,
Duct and aerial sluices of my body …
Classical Greece, those Italic cultures’ predecessor, is also present as underpinning, glimmering in the background of Hecht’s baroque canvases. I acknowledge that Hecht’s technical finesse gains a distinctive weightiness and depth when his wartime experience enters his poetic subject, whether directly or inferred through imagery. Yet the traumas expressed (though obviously underwritten by his Jewish identity) became decidedly transpersonal, even while his father’s somewhat mysterious mental health issues were evidently part of Hecht’s psychic mix. When the poet writes in the voice of a plague in “Dance of Death,” he seems not merely historical but prophetic. And Hecht is more than a bit twisted (I say this with disturbed admiration) when in “Behold the Lilies of the Field” he exquisitely describesValerian being slowly flayed alive, followed by the emperor’s skin being made into a life-size doll for public display.
Yezzi’s book doesn’t offer much in the way of objective judgement; there’s almost no poetic criticism specifically argued. Late Romance is not a work of literary analysis but a biography, with Yezzi claiming that clues about Hecht’s life are to be found “often beneath a layer of leaves and twigs, in the dank landscape of his poems.” Yezzi depends on others’ poetic opinions instead, observations found both in subject interviews and in publications. The result is that any real sense of Hecht’s poetry relies heavily on matters of reputation. There is much in Yezzi’s book of what others had to say about Hecht, both as critical praise or even as occasional condemnation; these poetry-circuit quotations include book-jacket blurbing made by friends and former students. All of this contributes to the takeaway that Hecht was a poet very much a part of the poetry world of his time. Such last-century contextualization may have its interest, but perhaps it best serves as example (or cautionary tale) to working poets.
Hecht had an emotionally rough time as a poet, not due to lack of attention (fiercely ambitious, he was well-situated from the get-go) but because of his deeply serious struggle to work out his poetic “take” on the postwar world. The well-oiled surfaces of “a poet’s life” (Yezzi’s subtitle) make his story’s successes look smoothly foreordained. He was born in 1923 on New York’s Upper East Side. He attended a set of elite private schools (Dalton, Collegiate, Horace Mann) as well as an all-boys summer camp (whose all-male drama productions he loved). Hitler invaded Poland in the fall of Hecht’s senior year of high school. Not a great student, he went on to Bard before becoming a soldier in 1943; through bad luck he just missed entry into the Army’s noncombatant ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program). He was sent to Europe in March, 1945. He had no idea, of course, that the war in Europe would be over in a few months.
Aside from his relatively brief experience as a soldier, his life in large part might be presented as a series of classroom experiences, first as a student and then as an instructor. At Bard, he was transformed from actor to poet under the tutelage of Larry Leighton, with whom he read the “new” poets, such as Pound, Eliot, Stevens and Auden. This was followed by a stint at NYU, first studying with and then replacing Allen Tate as the class instructor; at Kenyon (paid for by the GI Bill) he studied with John Crowe Ransom, then returned to teach at the Kenyon School of English. Hecht was hired by Paul Engle to teach at Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop; after this he buckled down and got his Masters degree at Columbia (with professors such as Trilling, Barzun and Van Doren, and alongside students Hollander, Ginsberg and Howard). For one term, he replaced Robert Fitzgerald at Harvard, where his students included Nicholas Christopher, Brad Leithauser and Mary Jo Salter. He also had a stint teaching at Yale.
I relay these name-dropping experiences not in strictly chronological order, as there is considerable circularity to his postings; Hecht returned as a professor to several of the institutions where he himself had once attended classes, including his undergraduate alma mater in 1962. Colleagues there included Saul Bellow and Hannah Arendt. My point is that that from quite early on, Hecht was well set up within a network of serious thinkers, fellow poets, artists, and editors. He even had contact with The New Yorker’s William Shawn as an undergraduate intern. Such a professional web led to a lifetime of prestigious academic positions, publications, prizes and fellowships. The list of awards Hecht received is long, with not too many of the major ones passing him by.
Due to early contact with Ransom and his circle, Hecht was very much a “child of the New Criticism.” He engaged in the intense seriousness of its close readings, a kind of textual analysis analogous to Freud’s mythically framed introspections. Yet coming at Yezzi’s biography without any particular knowledge of the details of Hecht’s life (which, I’ve discovered through Yezzi, included years of analysis and medication for depression), even I detect some psychosexual elements that feel inadequately explored, or, at the very least, there are a few suggestive dots that remain unconnected. First of all, Yezzi’s tentative exploration of the emotional problems of Hecht’s father strike me as unsatisfactory. There is something distinctly sexual in a number of their recorded exchanges, though I can’t put my finger on what exactly is “off” about them. Yezzi notes Hecht’s enthusiasm for playing female roles at summer camp without comment. He preemptively excludes Hecht from the erotic activities of the homosexual circle of Larry Leighton. And most oddly, his descriptions of Hecht’s lengthy involvements with W.H. Auden in the early 1950’s make no note of Auden’s proclivities or requests he is known to have made to potential protégés and assistants. I am hardly arguing for Hecht as a bisexual, but certainly there is a distinct aspect of queerness to his experiences that would frame Hecht as a more complex social being than the straight one Yezzi presents. His “The Mysteries of Caesar,” an awkward poem about an awkwardly repressed homosexual Latin teacher, goes unmentioned by Yezzi. That James Franco made a Kenneth Anger-inflected student film based on Hecht’s “Feast of Stephen” also strikes me as something worth mentioning.
Just before his Auden encounters, the already-published Hecht made his first postwar trip to Europe. It was a time when every young American poet seemed to be in Paris or thereabouts (Rich, Merwin, Merrill), an era dramatized in the early novels of James Baldwin. From there Hecht fell in love with Venice, continued through Tuscany and Naples, and determined to meet Auden on Ischia in 1950. This was also a thing young Americans did, drawn there by the island’s inexpensive bohemian lifestyle. That lengthy episode in Yezzi’s book doesn’t provide as much insight as it might. Perhaps the most illuminating part details Hecht’s long letter to Allen Tate, a missive that records Auden’s response to some of Hecht’s early poems. What’s fascinating is how spot-on Auden was about Hecht’s weaker poetic tendencies. He made special note of a certain impersonality of approach that can have an unpleasantly chilling effect, especially in consort with his poems’ formalist prosodies. (Auden’s reservations would be confirmed by some of Hecht’s more rigorous critics.) But there’s also something about the emotional tone and vocational implication of Hecht’s Ischia visits (a second season with his wife Pat would take place a few years after the first) that is missing from the narrative, especially given Hecht’s later extensive prose on Auden’s poems and person.
Hecht’s poetry career proper begins with a Rome Prize (the first awarded to a poet) at the American Academy in 1952, a date which places Hecht right in the middle of a new generation of American poetics. And yet, given the chronological and even geographical overlaps, there continues a sense of topics left unaddressed. Hecht was a reader for the Yale Younger Poets beginning in 1947 during the era when Auden was judge. Hecht was even reading manuscripts for the two years Auden chose not to name a winner from the submitted manuscripts, selecting only John Ashbery in 1956 outside of the competition’s protocols. James Schuyler was also on Ischia around this time, occupied as a typist for Auden if not serving as his actual literary assistant. Yet Yezzi proceeds as though the New York School doesn’t exist, even though Hecht lived in Greenwich Village in 1949, and spent summers on Fire Island in the fifties. While it hardly seems possible actual intersections didn’t occur, even if there is no record of such, at least some comparative frame of reference to these also-up-and-coming poets seems called for. Hecht was hardly notorious for his conversational discretion, so there must be some evidence of his own opinions.
Hecht’s first book, the 1954 A Summoning of Stones, received a mixed reception, even though its contents had been widely published for years in esteemed literary journals and so was in some sense pre-selected for success. (Some of Auden’s hesitations are echoed in Louise Bogan’s New Yorker review, a response that must have smarted.) Yezzi goes after Donald Davie, who criticized Hecht’s first book as being unmodern and “laced with the sort of wit that costs nothing,” but more than a little of Davie’s response holds true. Such negative observations put into perspective the great work that would follow, something much more than a “first book” and “groundwork for a career in the academy.”
Yet Hecht did certainly have that. His later academic positions would be held at the University of Rochester and Georgetown, but before returning to Bard, Hecht also taught at Smith. There he befriended both Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Hughes and Plath were both active supporters of Hecht’s vocation, and their presences underwrite much of the ambitious toughness of his second book, the Pulitzer-prize-winning The Hard Hours. Thirteen hard years passed between the first and second collection, and the excellence of The Hard Hours evidently results from of how much time and personal pain was put into it. For this the biography provides considerable insight.
The personal backdrop of Late Romance’s first half leads to Hecht’s troubled first marriage and difficult years of early parenthood. Yezzi makes a point of presenting his very beautiful first wife Pat as superficial and troublingly liberal in her affections. Given Hecht’s melancholia, it’s easy to see why he and “fun” Pat were often at odds, though having a second child of dubious fatherhood hardly makes a good case for Pat’s point of view. The “turn” of Yezzi’s book (as well as its title’s allusion to Shakespeare’s late plays) is occasioned by the introduction of his second wife, the still-living widow Helen. This is the Aristotelian “peripeteia” or reversal of bad fortune which forms the axis of of Hecht’s life, both in Yezzi’s version and the poet’s own. Hecht renewed his acquaintance with Helen D’Alessandro in 1971; she had been his Freshman English student at Smith some years earlier. Helen is clearly an admirable figure, still present both in and outside the written narrative. As Hecht’s literary executor, she is acknowledged by Yezzi as source of “guidance and support” and as “custodian of her husband’s legacy.” Her active role may be unavoidable (with her personal journal acting as a biographical source) but it has unquestionably affected the book’s composition. Yezzi’s prose includes a few awkward examples of fawning, particularly when he notes Helen’s skills as a housewife: “She was an accomplished cook who wrote cookbooks, and a professional interior designer, with her own clientele.” The Helen “peripeteia” certainly provides one framework (the poet’s life as Shakespearean sonnet with transformative turn somewhere after its middle), though I’m not convinced it’s the best or most illuminating one.
Even besides the Auden interlude, there are other relationships not deeply mined by Yezzi that would provide vocational and professional, rather than personal, insight. Certain figures are only tangentially treated in the book, presented without larger context for their influence or implication. As a first example, Hecht’s wartime trauma is intertwined with an important friendship. At the end of the war, Hecht is assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps where he meets Robie Macauley, a crucial moment in Hecht’s life. While Yezzi does explain who Macauley was (already a student of Ford Madox Ford at Olivet, protégé of Ransom at Kenyon when Jarrell and Lowell were there), he does not elaborate on how this lifelong friendship with an influential writer and editor would have considerable effect, not only on Hecht’s career but in the lines of his poems themselves. Yezzi notes that Arthur Mizener graciously reviewed Hecht’s first book in Kenyon Review but doesn’t recognize it as an “inside job,” given that Mizener had written the introduction to Allen Tate’s The Fathers. (Mizener would also go on to be the first biographer of Ford.) By no coincidence, it had been Tate who arranged for Hecht to get the Rome Prize (as well as the Russell Loines Prize some years later) and was “as close as [Hecht] had to a mentor.”
Another friendship that had identifiable effect on the poems is Hecht’s later relation to Joseph Brodsky, whom he met while teaching at Harvard. Sharing a deep affection for and obligation to Auden, Hecht really cared about Brodsky ‘s opinions. I desperately wanted to know more details about Brodsky’s criticism of the poem “See Naples and Die.” All we can determine from the text is that Brodsky’s dislike of the poem nagged at Hecht, suggesting that, once again, Brodsky’s observations corresponded to Auden’s observations. In any case, Hecht’s translations of Brodsky are also not plumbed for insight by Yezzi, though I would have loved to have a read on Hecht’s very odd translation of “Cape Cod Lullaby,” one of two long Brodsky translations that close The Venetian Vespers. “A Death in Winter,” his elegy for Brodsky at the close of Flight Among the Tombs, aches with chilled grief and carved granite, very much like Brodsky’s own poems.
Yet another friend was the classicist Helen Bacon, whom Hecht had first met at Smith. During his second residency at the American Academy in Rome (between Hecht’s two marriages) they worked together on a translation of Seven Against Thebes, traveling to Greece afterwords to celebrate the completion of their collaboration. Yezzi doesn’t have much to say about this superb version of Aeschylus, a project made possible through another longtime friend and advocate, William Arrowsmith (longtime editor at Hudson Review). Arrowsmith writes in his editor’s foreword of “the patterns of human destiny grounded in the archaic poetry of the Greek earth,” a ritualistic rhythm which Hecht astonishingly transmutes into American English:
The city echoes with loud, bellowing howls;
It is a death-trap, fatally self-ensnared …
Who shall account for this portioning, by what law
Comes this allotment of pain, grief and despair?
Hecht would make another try at Greek tragedy, though only sections of the choruses of Oedipus at Colonos would be published. I have my own memory of Helen Bacon, excitedly talking about her collaboration with “Tony” some twenty years after the fact. In their book’s introduction, the paired translators make note of the play’s relevance to the Vietnam War with words that remain both relevant and true: “A nation can rarely redeem itself from its follies and errors, the cost of which in human misery is incalculable.”
Hecht’s collaborations with visual artists were also significant. Yezzi does an excellent job discussing Hecht’s friendship with Leonard Baskin. This is an intense relation, beginning at Smith, that seems nearly paternal. Ted Hughes is at frame’s edge as supportive yet indisputably rivalrous sibling. (In contrast, one detects that Anthony did not consider his actual brother Roger a serious poetic rival.) Baskin was not much older than Hecht, but the artist brought to the poet something from their shared Jewish past that anchored Hecht’s writings with an aged, hand-carved soulfulness. Not only did Hecht’s readings and references from the Bible stem from dialogues with the artist (the son of a rabbi), many of Hecht’s best poems were spurred into being by Baskin. His Flight Among the Tombs (1996) revolves around a set of macabre Baskin engravings.
A second visual artist, less completely discussed by Yezzi, is the sculptor Dimitri Hadzi, to whom Hecht dedicated “The Origin of the Centaur” in The Hard Hours. Hadzi’s collaboration with Hecht in the David Godine edition on Venetian Vespers goes unmentioned, even though Hadzi’s part in the poem’s creation was something considerably more than mere illustrator. (Published in 1979, that small book alone would guarantee Hecht’s place “among the English poets,” the frail wish he made upon his death bed.) Late in the biography, Yezzi references a letter Hecht writes to Hadzi, then hospitalized for depression, a note that only begins to suggest the emotionally empathetic seriousness of their friendship.
Hecht’s very wide circle of friends and colleagues overlap. When I heard Hecht read in New York as a young poet, I always thought of him as one of the Atheneum poets (sages placed on marble steps as in The School of Athens), the “stable,” as Yezzi puts it, run by Harry Ford. That group (Dickey, Howard, Hollander, Justice, Merrill, Merwin, Van Duyn, et al.) formed an ever-present inner circle from the 1960s well into the 90s, a group regularly published in “prestigious” magazines edited by individuals such as The New Yorker’s Howard Moss (also an Atheneum poet). But at this point in time, the real question is not how Hecht compares to such colleagues or younger once-influential practitioners of the “established style” (as Marjorie Perloff described it), but how he holds up to those poets perceived as belonging to an opposite camp. This is, admittedly, not an issue that Yezzi is necessarily required to address directly, but the matter still hangs unanswered.
Perloff wrote in her review of The Hard Hours, “Hecht is not the major poet his admirers claim him to be,” but the decades have proven her wrong. Yet I do wonder whether Denis Donoghue’s (not entirely misplaced albeit “devastating”) takedown of Millions of Strange Shadows in 1977 didn’t serve as painful motivation for the excellence of (and subsequent positive critical reception for) The Venetian Vespers. In any case, sides no longer need to be taken. For present readers of poetry, it’s hardly a matter of either/or but rather one of both/and. Auden provides a useful crux. It really comes down to different forms of musicality and aesthetic preference. Hecht had a mild disagreement with Auden about “favored” music. Auden teased Hecht that anyone who said that the late quartets of Beethoven were among his favorites was just “putting on airs.” This is nonsense on Auden’s part, of course, a bon mot articulated for effect. It’s exactly the kind of dismissal that lingers in ongoing tussles between advocates of the New York School and those of Hecht’s circle. But it would be a very great shame if false divisions within the poetry world (derived in large part from careerism) prevent younger poets and critics from giving Hecht’s work a fair reading.
For Yezzi, Shakespeare is one key to Hecht’s greatness. The works of Shakespeare were certainly what Hecht most loved to teach, and Shakespeare permeates the entire oeuvre, most especially in Hecht’s poems of soliloquy. That distinctive quality of dramatic performance (lacking the campy undertones of Richard Howard) may not age all that well. The elder Hecht became notorious for his fussy corrections of Shakespearean scholarship or complaints about how the Bard was read aloud by younger poets. Was Hecht’s reliance on Shakespeare a strength or a weakness? For myself, I wonder. When reading some of the later work in particular, I think to myself, “Tony, it’s time to break that pentameter!” Some of the free verse in The Darkness and the Light feels close to blessèd release, like the opening of a lead door out of a tomb. In short, Yezzi’s Shakespearean tack, as inarguably valid as it might objectively be, would not form the basis for the case I myself would make.
Nor, returning to my very first point, do I think his argument for Hecht as witness to WWII is the strongest one, though it very much informs the received idea. As anthologized as they may be, his wartime poems don’t hold up to those of Jewish poets other than American (Celan, Radnoti, Wat, Jabès, Sachs, Amichai, Sultzkever). This is in large part because the American Hecht’s personal experience just doesn’t carry the same historical weight as that of the Europeans. At his worst (and it gets worse in later poems) Hecht’s lyrics manifest a privileged American male’s self-involved self-dramatization. Classism and sexism appear as that of a tourist encountering misfortune with a sense of outraged superiority (“See Naples and Die”) or it expresses itself as the speaker in “Rara Avis in Terris” complaining about campus female “Bacchae” feeding off “white European males.” The archness of Hecht’s stand-in personae may enrich his work with a certain clever elegance, but those voices’ generational entitlement (whether expressing “his” point of view or not) can also really rub the wrong way.
I would argue instead that Hecht’s real strength is tied to a transgressiveness set at an angle to his formal prosodic choices. In his most powerful work, he mines a darkness of the human psyche not limited to either Jewish or American experience, a capacity for cruelty (made most evident in wartime) in which the poetic “I” himself may also indulge. Ironically, I suspect he translates extremely well into German. His own use of German (Vorsichtichtkeit, dunkeler Schacht, wo die Zitronen blühn) captures something unique to that language, something for which English cannot substitute, an acoustic of bullying percussion suited to Hecht’s historically haunted lyricism. In my view, what’s truly great in Hecht is black and bitter, something other than the balanced “indelible record of suffering and joy, darkness and light,” proposed by Yezzi. Instead, I quote the painter Fuseli’s working method (as channelled by Hecht): “I first sits myself down. / I then works myself up. Then I throws in / My darks. And then I take away my lights.” For while I don’t dispute the happiness Helen Hecht brought to the poet’s actual life, any joyful lightness leaking into his poems tends to belong to the realm of experienced art.
Is Hecht important? Does he remain relevant? Will he endure? Poetic “importance” is traditionally determined by three things: the biography, the Collected Letters, and the Collected Poems. (A hefty Selected Letters was published in 2013.) The bulk of these major tasks are now completed, with The Complete Poems (edited by Philip Hoy) coming out the same publication day as Yezzi’s Late Romance. It will certainly be interesting to see how the whole poetic oeuvre is read by younger poets in one (both literally and figuratively) heavy volume. But as far as the matter of endurance, I can’t help but end with Hecht’s bleakly Biblical lines from The Venetian Vespers:
A virus’s life-span is twenty minutes.
Think of it as evolutionary zeal,
Like the hyper-active balance-wheel of a watch,
Busy with swift mutations, trundling through
Its own Silurian epochs in a week;
By fierce ambition and Darwinian wit
Acquiring its immunities against
Our warfares and our plagues of medication.
Blessed are the unseen micro-organisms,
For without doubt they shall inherit the earth.
Their generations shall be as the sands of the sea.
[Published by St. Martin’s Press on November 7, 2023, 480 pages, $40.00US hardcover]