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  #1  
Unread 11-08-2001, 07:04 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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Professor Hecht, here are three questions I''ve long wanted to ask you:

In the hard hours of a very long life, you’ve earned your perch high above the Phaedriades Cliffs and the Kastallian Spring. What do you think of the youngsters swarming the lower slopes of Parnassus, and what advice do you have to give us?

My teacher, R.P. Warren, studied with John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt, and I believe you studied with him at Kenyon. What do you think of him, both as a poet and a teacher?

How highly do you prize Thomas Hardy in the pantheon of English verse, and has your esteem for him grown as you have grown older?


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  #2  
Unread 11-08-2001, 10:34 PM
jasonhuff jasonhuff is offline
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what i'd like to ask mr hecht is who were his biggest influences as a young poet and who are some of his favorite contemporary poets.

also, it would be interesting to hear what he thinks of the current state of poetry. i've heard a lot of talk about how bad off it is, and i'm wondering if he feels it is as bad as some say, and what could be done to bring it back to the public.

also, i'd like to know what drew him to formal poetry. and since i'm trying to write formal verse, if he has any advice to the young poet on how to improve his verse.

and i'd like to thank him for taking the time to be our guest lariat.

thanks,
jason
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  #3  
Unread 11-10-2001, 06:00 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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David Mason, who will join us as guest Lariat in 2002, forwarded these questions for Professor Hecht, who was Dave's PhD advisor at Syracuse twenty years ago:

Mr. Hecht, you have worked brilliantly in strict and loose iambics, rhymed and blank verse, and free verse. Can you say anything to us about how these formal choices are made? What do you know ahead of time, and what do you generally discover as you move further into the composition of a poem?

How important has Baudelaire been to you, either as a formal or a tonal model?

Same as the above, substituting Shakespeare.

Eliot was once asked whether he knew the value of his poetic accomplishment and he is said to have replied that he did not. As one of the most accomplished poets of the last fifty years, do you know, really know, how
important your work is?

> ----------
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  #4  
Unread 11-10-2001, 09:34 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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Here are Professor Hecht’s answers to my questions, Jason’s, and Alan’s question on slant rhyme which was posted on the mastery thread.

1) Young poets if they’re any good, don’t usually need advice, unless it were a delicate suggestion that some poem of theirs is not up to the highest level of their work. What they can use from older poets is encouragement. And encouragement is not always an easy commodity to hand out. It is all too easy for many poets to become discouraged. Editors are capricious; book publishers are not usually enamoured of a poetry list; critics can be caustic, and some have made minor celebrities of themselves as swashbuckling devastators of literary reputations. No less disheartening is it to find that popular taste bestows its coronals on the low brows of the second-rate. This happens all too often. But it is reassuring these days to look about and see how many excellent young poets are now writing, publishing, and being acknowledged as deserving of praise and notice.

2)Ransom was an excellent poet who wrote within the confines of a very limited emotional range. His output, too, was restricted, and he stopped writing poetry altogether by 1945, though he lived to 1974. Some of his energy was diverted into editing the Kenyon Review; still more into criticism. And the criticism that engaged him was largely of a theoretical nature, and was premised on an imperfect understanding of Kant’s aesthetics. Ransom’s poems were wryly self-deprecating, ironic, and flavored with regret about a kind of culture that was lost in the War Between the States. The regret is mixed with a forlorn pride, and is stated with a diffidence. Ransom was a good teacher because he provoked students to think for themselves, sometimes taking unlikely or even indefensible postions. He was a quirky man, and this meant that students could not simply passively approve of everything he said.

3) Hardy was one of Ransom’s favorite poets, as he has become one of mine. Like Ransom, he is quirky, but anyone who wrote 947 poems maybe allowed to be quirky once in a while. Some of the strength of Hardy’s poetry derives from his having also been a fine novelist, who had a sense of drama such as stands narrative writers in good stead. He, also, is an ironist, but a deeper and more thoughtful ironist that Ransom. Hardy can make your bones rattle, whereas Ransom makes your flesh twinge. Hardy went on writing to the very end, as Ransom did not. In this, Hardy was at one with the likes of Sophocles, as he circumspectly notes in “An Ancient to Ancients.” His poems of desolation are as powerful as anyone’s, and he was an early model for Auden.

In reply to Jason Huff: The biggest influences on my early poems were Donne, Yeats, Eliot, Ransom and Auden. I make it a policy never to name favorites among contemporaries because there are so many one is sure to forget some names and create bad will thereby. To the poet in Beaumont TX, I can think of many fine young formal poets now writing, and I regard the current state of poetry as healthy, with no more than a normal sprinkling of idiots. What drew me to formal poetry was the 17th C. Metaphysicals.

Slant Rhymes: they can be lighthearted if wittily employed, but more commonly they can deliberately disconcert, as they do in the work of Owen and Dickinson. Auden and Snodgrass are adept at slant rhymes. In a two-quatrain poem Jamew Merrill ends his brief lines of the first stanza with: magic, taffeta, spinach, taken. Not a rhyme to be found. But the second stanza lines end with: Logic, Greenwhich, laughter, token.

Generally speaking, the best education a poet can get is to fall in love with the work of a number of good poets—not all at the same time, but having intense, passionate affairs with their work one after the other—and to get to know the work so well that it becomes part of their mind and a guide to feelings they had not entertained before. Apprenticing oneself to the work of an admired poet, if thoughtfully and reverently undertaken, can be richly instructive. Almost every poet I admire has gone through such an apprenticeship and knows a great deal—let me repeat that, a great deal—of poetry by heart.
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  #5  
Unread 11-10-2001, 02:45 PM
Alan Sullivan Alan Sullivan is offline
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Tim, thank you so much for initiating this project. You do a great service by connecting this wonderfully learned old master with those of us who are computer literate but will never know literature as he does.

Alan
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  #6  
Unread 11-11-2001, 11:03 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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Here are Tony's replies to questions posted by David Mason: "I'm content with Housman's formula (in The Name and the Nature of Poetry) about how poems begin: "...if I were obliged, not to define poetry, but to name the class of things to which it belongs, I should call it a secretion; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster. I think that my own case, though I may not deal with the material so cleverly as the oyster does, is the latter," and he goes on to say that in his particular case it starts when he is rather out of health, and that the experience is "generally agitating and exhausting." He and I part company in this view of poetry as an ailment or affliction; but the figure of the grain of sand--some small detail--instigating the process seems to me right. And this small detail could be almost anything: something seen, a few words, a metaphor. Sometimes something larger: a metaphoric relationship between two oddly assorted realms (as Hopkins discovered in writing his poem called "The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe," which carries the comparison for 126 lines.) This provocative grain demands study on my part; I must decide whether the best way to deal with it is the form of, say, a dramatic monologue, usually cast in vernacular speech, a perhaps heightened prose, and therefore probably suited to blank verse. But it may suggest an elaborate statement which will serve as a ground from which everything that follows may flow; in which case the initial statement may be best formulated as a rhymed stanza, to which all the ensuing stanzas must be made to conform. There is no easy rule of thumb for these choices, and I have sometimes found myself obliged to recast a poem in another form from the one in which I had begun it.

Baudelaire has been from very early on an immensely valuable model and source of energy. He was, first of all, willing to risk the most "unpoetical" materials, and adopt the most irreverent postures in the name of truths we normally decline to face. He was a very courageous poet. He was also a great formalist poet, though he wrote prose-poems as well; along with criticism, journals, essays, etc. He was often an angry poet, which I find sympathetic; though he could be beautifully tender as well.

As for Shakespeare, he was able to do anything, and he repays infinite study. Obviously in regard to dramatic verse, even if only monologues. But the sonnets, the poems in and outside the plays are wonderful. I taught a selection of Shakespeare plays for very many years, and I learned new things each time I did so.

I have no idea what value should be put upon my work. It seems to me that Eliot was right, and only a few poets have guessed at the true worth of their work. Keats was able to declare that for his tombstone he wanted the inscription "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Herbert was uncertain whether any of his poems deserved preservation, and Virgil wanted the Aeneid destroyed; and it would have been but for the intervention of Augustus.

And the response to Conny's questions on the Mastery Board:

To the writer who asks "Is it your job to explain the world or to make it a better place?" I reply: Making it a better place is the job of a citizen, a husband or a lover, a teacher or a public servant. We all have that job, whether or not we write. My job as a writer is to write as well as possible, in order to give pleasure to readers, and pleasure of a special kind that poetry affords.

As for WWII, I no longer have the nightmares I used to have. And warfare has changed enormously since those days. Bad as my experiences were, I am grateful not to have had to serve in Vietnam, for very many reasons. The sort of deceit with which poems can best deal is the deceit of one's own heart, or the deceit that arises from the falling out of lovers: as in Wyatt's "They flee from me that sometime did me seek." Barbarism does not lend itself easily to poetry, though some poets have attempted to deal with it. There are good poems about war by Thomas Hardy and by Housman, neither of whom actually fought. And some poets, like James Dickey, didn't fight as much as they claimed.

Lariat's note: I have forwarded two questions from Nyctom, one from Mike Juster, and a final one from me, to Mr. Hecht. I shall post the questions and responses tomorrow, by way of bidding Anthony Hecht adieu. I think he's given us great food for thought, and I'll welcome further discussion. Lacking a computer, Mr. Hecht won't be able to participate.
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  #7  
Unread 11-11-2001, 09:12 PM
Robert J. Clawson Robert J. Clawson is offline
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Tim,

This is a wonderful forum. It's the best place on the web to hang five.

Bob
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  #8  
Unread 11-12-2001, 06:06 AM
conny conny is offline
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Thankyou very much to Mr. Hecht- and to Tim
Murphy for taking the time to set it all up.
I`m with Mr. clawson, though I have no clue
what hang five means. This place is just the
best thing on the web.

DC
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  #9  
Unread 11-12-2001, 08:00 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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Dear Tony, I’ve just read your marvelous responses to Mason and one of our Scottish members, which I’ll post this afternoon. Many thanks. Unless there are really worthy follow-up questions, the following will be the last. You have had about 300 visitors, and I shall print out a transcript of all the discussions and send them to you as a memento of your first command performance on the Internet.

Tom Pickering asks:

How do subjects present themselves to you, how long do you spend revising them, and how do you know when you have reached a point of diminishing return when editing a poem?

Which of your own poems do you like best and why?

A.M. Juster asks:

What are some of your favorite non-iambic, metrical poems, and have you any advice for an iambic poet setting out on such treacherous seas?

And Tim asks:

You’ve observed that Ransom stopped writing verse 30 years before his death, but that Hardy and Sophocles “went the distance,” as the athletes say. You’ve cast your lot with the latter. Yet you’ve suffered seriously ill health in the five years during which you wrote Darkness and Light. How did you manage it, and has infirmity been a spur to creativity? This grateful reader cannot but think that must be so.

Respectfully,

November 11, 2001
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  #10  
Unread 11-12-2001, 08:05 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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Here are Anthony Hecht’s responses to the last questions:

To Tom Pickering—Choice of subjects by poets may be among the most mysterious acts they make. What occurs to one poet as a rich subject might have been totally ignored by another, who failed to see any possibilities where the first one found them. Not all poets would care to write about, say, a sparrow, a toad, or an unadorned jar. But good poems have been written about all three. It will depend on the quality of ATTENTION devoted to a subject: considered with enough care and the full resources of the mind, almost anything can turn out to be rich enough to serve as the subject of a poem. As for how long I personally spend revising a poem, the true answer is that will vary but according to no rule or pattern I can identify. The short poem, “The Darkness and the Light Are Both Alike to Thee” took about ten years of being fiddled with, while the long poem, “The Venetian Vespers” took two months. As for the danger of over-editing and revising, I must go along with Valery who observed that poems are never finished, only abandoned. As for my favorite among my own poems, it is usually the most recent poem I’ve written.

To A.M. Juster—Among my favorite non-iambic, metrical poems I would list the syllabic poems by Auden, Richard Howard, Marianne Moore. The poems of John Skelton, the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I have no advice for young poets, except to read as widely, and commit as much good poetry as possible to memory.

To Tim—Hard to say whether illness is a spur to writing. It was for Housman, who in the essay I previously quoted said “I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health.” Doubtless his blindness was a challenge to Milton. But we must be grateful that no handicaps or serious illnesses discouraged some poets, who might otherwise have thrown in the towel. There are enough discouragements in life, and more than enough for poets to feel that the game is not worth the candle. When we feel that way it is good to remember than not so long ago poets wrote only for the eyes of their friends, and without any expectation of publication. “Still govern thou my song,/ Urania, and fit audience find, though few.” (Paradise Lost, VII. 30.) At the same time there are those poets, like Wordsworth, who excellent as he was, went maundering on long after this talent had left him. The great models of imaginative survival in modern times are Yeats and Hardy and Robert Penn Warren. And Stevens. And Frost. It is also worth remembering from time to time that some great poets, like Baudelaire, produced only one book of poems, as George Herbert did.
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