When we were younger, Alan and I used Clement Wood's invaluable rhyme dictionary. Unfortunately, it has now been rewritten and reissued by the appropriately named Ronald Bogus. So those of you in search of a good one, search the used book stores. I didn't pass this question on to Mr. Hecht, because the answer seems obvious. If you seek slant rhymes for omen, look up women, shaman, semen, daimon, lemon, etc. Alan once asked Dick Wilbur if he employed a rhyme dictionary, and he ruefully grinned and confessed: "No, I'm afraid that after all this time I AM a rhyme dictionary." I suspect that Mr. Hecht would respond in like fashion.

Thought I should bump this up to the top of the board in view of our friend's demise.

Tim
When an American/Australian friend was flying home for a visit she asked me what I wanted her to bring me. I said "The Darkness and the Light" by Anthony Hecht, and she did bring it to me. Since then I have managed to get a copy of "Flight Among the Tombs".
I had an argument with my local library because they didn't have any of his work.
He has that something extra which marks a timeless poet and yet he is very much a man of his time.

I edited back in because I noticed I said "is" instead of "was". I still say "is".

Janet

This Dirda on Hecht was posted on another forum and I thought it might be of interest here.

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited October 22, 2004).]

A consolation for Tim.

An excerpt from Hoy's interview with Anthony Hecht:
" Hecht:...when you ask, 'why would a boy stand for hours in front of a scene of great bitterness?' the answer is, of course, that he does not do so willingly; he is compelled to. And he is compelled to because no one comes to take him away from all this barrenness. You are perfectly right to see arid and defeated landscapes cropping up in a good number of my poems, as is the case with certain winter scenes of Breughel. They were for me a means to express a desolation of the soul. There are such scenes in Hardy, as well as in a fine young poet, not yet well known, named Timothy Murphy. May I quote a short poem of his?

Twice Cursed
Bristling with fallen trees
and choked with broken ice
the river threatens the house.
I'll wind up planting rice
if the spring rains don't cease.
What ancestral curse
prompts me to farm and worse,
convert my woes to verse?


I'm not a farmer, and thus not subject to their special dangers, but for me a bleak and forlorn landscape can assemble and convey a deep sense of despair."
interview

conversation with Hecht

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited October 22, 2004).]

It is interesting that he uses the word "despair" to indicate the emotional quality of "bleak and forlorn landscapes" - objective correlatives of "a desolation of the soul." But it doesn't really matter what you call it, the fact is we poets need this state like fish need water. But I would say that this sense of "a desolation of the soul" is the experience of the soul itself. Many mystics have said so.

As Evelyn Underhill writes:

Eckhart says of this "desert" state of being:

And the psychologist, James Hillman:

.

I have always read that desolate passage from the Hecht poem as the soul's nostalgia for its homeland, rather than a terrible experience forced upon a child which has now scarred him for life. Today, in our present culture, this experience is mostly treated as a pathology to be cured by drugs. But I see this desolation experience as the source of all creativity. For me, the word "despair" is what the ego calls its struggles to extricate itself from this state. No resistance, no despair.

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Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited October 23, 2004).]

This was the first Hecht poem I believe I ever read. R.I.P.


PROSPECTS
by Anthony Hecht


We have set out from here for the sublime
Pastures of summer shade and mountain stream;
I have no doubt we shall arrive on time.

Is all the green of that enamelled prime
A snapshot recollection or a dream?
We have set out from here for the sublime

Without provisions, without one thin dime,
And yet, for all our clumsiness, I deem
It certain that we shall arrive on time.

No guidebook tells you if you'll have to climb
Or swim. However foolish we may seem,
We have set out from here for the sublime

And must get past the scene of an old crime
Before we falter and run out of steam,
Riddled by doubt that we'll arrive on time.

Yet even in winter a pale paradigm
Of birdsong utters its obsessive theme.
We have set out from here for the sublime;
I have no doubt we shall arrive on time.

Finally the Sydney Morning Herald has published an obituary for Anthony Hecht. I think it's rather a good blend of various obituaries.



Sorry. The page is" not found". I'll go back to source and see what I can do.
No the link won't post so here it is. The Sydney Morning Herald will forgive me I'm sure. If they read this they should forgive a serious poetry forum for respecting them sufficiently to use their obituary:
________

Confronting last century's horrors

November 2, 2004


Anthony Hecht, Poet, 1923-2004



Anthony Hecht, one of the most accomplished American poets of his generation, has died aged 81. Hecht's work combined a passionate interest in form with an unflinching determination to confront the horrors of 20th-century history, in particular World War II, in which he fought, and the Holocaust.

He was born in New York to parents of German-Jewish ancestry. Hecht defined his family as "upper-middle-class", but his father's reckless business ventures and the 1929 crash made him feel the family was always poised to plunge down the financial and social scale.


While studying English at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, he decided he wanted to become a poet, an ambition his parents tried to discourage: they delegated a family friend, Ted Geisel, better known by his pen name of Dr Seuss, to dissuade him from pursuing this vocation, to no avail.


After three years at Bard, Hecht was drafted into the 97th Infantry Division and sent to Europe. The horrific experiences of war permeate many of his most moving poems. His division helped liberate Flossenburg, a concentration camp near Buchenwald, where the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer died. Hecht was instructed to interview inmates in the hope of assembling evidence with which to try the camp commanders. He later commented: "The place, the suffering, the prisoners' accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking."


On his return to America, Hecht took advantage of the GI Bill to study with the poet-critic John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College. He soon met fellow poets such as Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop.


His first collection, A Summoning of Stones, (1954) revealed his mastery of a complex range of forms and an impassioned awareness of the forces of history. His poetry has often been compared with that of W.H. Auden, with whom he became friends during a stay in 1951 on Ischia, where Auden spent each summer. In 1993 he published The Hidden Law, a critical reading of Auden's oeuvre.


Hecht soon won many admirers, and prizes, including the Prix de Rome in 1951 and a Pulitzer in 1968 for The Hard Hours. It was in this volume that Hecht began to explore his memories of the war - memories so potent they had resulted in a nervous breakdown in 1959. Hecht spent three months in hospital, but unlike Sylvia Plath, whom he had met at Smith College, he was spared electric shock therapy.


The long poem Rites and Ceremonies is Hecht's most disturbing response to the Holocaust:

But in the camps, one can look through a huge square
Window, like an aquarium, upon a room
The size of my livingroom filled with human hair ...
Out of one trainload, about five hundred in all,
Twenty the next morning were hopelessly insane.
And some there be that have no memorial,
That are perished as though they had never been.
Made into soap.

In comparison with his hero, Auden, Hecht wrote slowly and relatively little: in the course of a 60-year career, he published only seven collections of poetry, and his complete works would fill only 500 pages.

His poetry reflects his erudition. He earned his living as a teacher of poetry, principally at the University of Rochester, where he was John H. Deane professor of poetry and rhetoric, but he also had stints at Smith, Bard, Harvard, Georgetown and Yale. His poetry shows itself aware of the traditions of European and American poetry, but also concerns itself with other art forms, in particular painting and architecture.

The title poem of his 1979 volume, The Venetian Vespers, is a monologue spoken by a "mentally unsound" American who has settled in Venice in the hope of escaping his memories of the war. Hecht plays off his suffering and stoic resolve against the city's decay, dignity, beauty and history.

It is easy to ignore the suave, humorous side of Hecht. He created much of his most enjoyable work by updating the classics, for example reworking Horace's odes as though the Latin author were a mooching Manhattanite. And he is excellent value in a poem such as The Ghost in the Martini, in which the poet's ego and id have a row just as he is about to make a pass at a woman much younger than himself; or one of his best-known pieces, The Dover Bitch. Here, in the language of Holden Caulfield, he pities the woman who features in Matthew Arnold's poem: "To have been brought/ All the way down from London, and then be addressed/ As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort/ Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty."


He abjured performance poets, wrote uninhibitedly on the old theme of female mutability, and rounded on feminist academics by imagining them in heaven, "Feasting off dead white European males, / Or local living ones, if all else fails".


Hecht's poetry will stand, alongside that of James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, John Hollander and Richard Howard, as exemplifying the virtues of a commitment to the formal that produced some of the finest American poetry of the 20th century. His work has also been influential on younger poets such as Brad Leithauser, Mary Jo Salter and J.D. McClatchy.


He was the recipient of almost every honour in American poetry including the Bollingen Prize (1983), the Tanning Prize (1997), and the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal (2000).

He is survived by his second wife, the cookery writer and interior designer Helen D'Alessandro, and their son, and two sons from his first marriage.

The Guardian; The Telegraph, London




T

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited November 04, 2004).]

Tuesday, Election Day, was gloriously sunny here in Berkeley. Wednesday it rained. Thursday, today, it's simply cold. It's so strange to see the pathetic fallacy at work in regular life.

Anyway, today I was thinking of Hecht, and this one out of 1977's Millions of Strange Shadows:

An Autumnal


The lichens, like a gorgeous, soft disease
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTIn rust and gold rosette
Emboss the bouldered wall, and creepers seize
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTIn their cup-footed fret,

Ravelled and bare, such purchase as affords.
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTThe sap-tide slides to ebb,
And leafstems, like the drumsticks of small birds,
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTLie snagged in a spiderweb.

Down at the stonework base, among the stump-
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTFungus and feather moss,
Dead leaves are sunken in a shallow sump
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTOf energy and loss,

Enriched now with the colors of old coins
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTAnd brilliance of wet leather.
An earthen tea distills at the roots-groins
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTInto the smoky weather

A deep, familiar essence of the year:
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTA sweet fetor, a ghost
Of foison, gently welcoming us near
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTTo humus, mulch, compost.

The last mosquitoes lazily hum and play
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTAbove the yeasting earth
A feeble Gloria to this cool decay
BANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTBANNED POSTOr casual dirge of birth.

A Letter (probably very well known to Hecht readers) is one I like very much. The indents are fiddly to reproduce, so I include this link to the poem: http://www.diacenter.org/prg/poetry/94_95/hecht.html

That Australian obituary above mentions some of Hecht’s lighter work but omits to say that he was the co-inventor, with John Hollander, of the double dactyl. Or perhaps (as I believe Hollander maintained) Hecht invented the form and they both publicised it. On another board recently I came across a (near) double-dactyl to Hecht. Its author acknowledges that he didn't strictly follow the form, and this set me thinking. I came up with this, which I trust will seem appropriate rather than irreverent.

Hactylus dactylus,
Anthony Hecht is all
done now with crocuses,
finished with death:

done with the sliding of
sea in the moonlight, the
blood’s repetitions, which
end with the breath.



[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited November 04, 2004).]

Henry, I like it so
much I will buy
it if ever I find
it on sale in a
bookshop.


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Mark Allinson