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