Mark, in my twenties I sounded rather regretably like Yeats:
Ganymede and the Eagle
A sudden blow, and outstretched talons clasp
the struggling boy, pinning him to the rock
from which he piped to his indifferent flock.
Helpless, he wriggles in the raptor's grasp
while his rapacious captor strips its prize,
tearing his flimsy chiton with its beak.
Now bearing him to the Olympic peak,
the eagle screams its triumph to the skies
but does not let its naked victim drop.
Zeus has assumed the likeness of a bird
to save this shepherd from the common herd.
Filling his cup when the Immortals sup,
kissing the Father of the Gods to sleep,
how could he miss the maidens or the sheep?
Writing this parody helped me get over it! The adult voice coincided with the acquisition of the first farm and with my first letters from Wilbur, who accused me of "insufficient charge" in the language of my predominant pentameters.
I should mention that a good argument can be made that Hecht came late to the severity of voice that characterized his later books. In Hard Hours, published when he was forty, he is almost a ventriloquist, with poems sounding like Stevens, Auden, Eliot and Yeats all side by side with poems that prefigure the later work.
Wilbur's very different. Although the playful, baroque vocabulary of his youth is now rarely to be found, that's a matter of a voice simply changing and maturing. A couple of years ago somebody put up a new Wilbur poem I'd not seen at Mastery and asked whose is it. After three lines I knew the answer. Of course it was written in aba haiku stanza, which made it a cinch, but I think I'd find it just as easy to recognize his pentameters.
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