My Davey wrote a review of the same books—Yezzi's biography and Hoy's
Collected Poems—published in the WSJ last month. I've copied it from a scan (I don't subscribe to WSJ), and offer it here as a different perspective, and as an example of a different style of reviewing.
Anthony Hecht: The Life and Work of a Poet’s Poet
Reviews of Hecht’s ‘Collected Poems’ and David Yezzi’s ‘Late Romance: Anthony Hecht, a Poet’s Life.’
By
David Mason
Nov. 3, 2023 9:57 am ET
W.H. Auden and Anthony Hecht, backstage in 1967 at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Photo: Jill Krementz
Anthony Hecht, a poet who surpassed others of his generation by the breadth of his subjects and the fierce refinement of his writing, was much more than a witness to war and the Holocaust. To call him a dark poet neglects his many passages of comedy and joy. He was also our most painterly writer, sometimes slathering on the language with a palette knife, yet he could write poems, as the English poet Ted Hughes noted, with an “absolute raw simplicity and directness.” Hecht reminded us in the poem “Rites and Ceremonies” that “the contemplation of horror is not edifying.” He wrote just as eloquently about love as about despair.
Two books celebrate the centenary of Hecht’s birth in 1923. The poet and critic David Yezzi’s “Late Romance” is a first-rate literary biography, graceful, thorough and moving, without the bloat commonly found in such endeavors. And the English publisher and editor Philip Hoy has given us a superb “Collected Poems,” including not only work from Hecht’s previous collections but also seven beautiful “Late Poems From Liguria” and a worthwhile selection of uncollected work. Since Hecht is among the most erudite of modern poets, steeped in the Bible as well as Shakespeare, readers may be pleased to find nearly 50 pages of textual notes, plus a brief chronology.
Born to a family of nonobservant Jews in New York City, Hecht grew up with privilege but also a sense of life’s precariousness. His father frequently failed in business and thrice attempted suicide. His mother’s social pretensions eventually got on Hecht’s nerves. At the age of 6 he saw one result of the 1929 market crash—the blanket-covered bodies of suicides lying on the sidewalks. At the Horace Mann School and then Bard College he fell in love with the arts. Mr. Yezzi’s biography reveals that Hecht studied painting, which explains some of the “fine particulars” of his poems. His diction alternates between a Latinate loftiness and an earthier realism—a deliberate irony learned partly from writers like James Joyce and W. H. Auden. Consider an image central to his great narrative poem, “The Venetian Vespers,” where a soldier from heavy weapons carries a copy of “a book of etiquette by Emily Post” into battle—his talisman and “fiction of kindliness.” The man is killed “by enemy machine-gun fire . . . / And there he crouched, huddled over his weapon, / His brains wet in the chalice of his skull.”
Like Richard Wilbur, to whom he is often compared, Hecht was profoundly changed by his Army service in World War II. Fearing he would be drafted, he left college and enlisted, eventually seeing combat with the 97th Infantry Division. Mr. Yezzi reveals that Hecht suffered from survivor’s guilt, partly because he never fired his weapon at anyone in battle. He was also present as a translator from French and German at “the liberation of Flossenbürg Concentration Camp . . . an hour’s drive from his Jewish great-grandfather’s hometown of Buttenheim,” Mr. Yezzi writes. “What he saw in that camp and in combat ruined his sleep.”
The war in Europe was horrifying enough, but his unit would have been sent to Japan if they had not been terribly saved by the atomic bomb. After the war Hecht embarked on a new life as an academic and writer, often dividing his time between Europe, where he lived on generous fellowships, and a string of teaching jobs in the U.S. He published his first book of poems, “A Summoning of Stones,” in 1954, the same year he married Patricia Harris, a fashion model whom Sylvia Plath called as “pleasant as razor blades.” It was an unhappy marriage. Hecht suffered from depression and what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Harris was a party girl, frustrated by his silences. They had a son, Jason; then Harris became pregnant by another man and gave birth to a second son, Adam. Hecht was a devoted father to both boys until, after a divorce, Harris removed them to live with her in Brussels.
By giving us the complete text, long unavailable, of “A Summoning of Stones,” Mr. Hoy allows us to see that Hecht’s complex aesthetic, in which art is partly a compensation for life’s pain and disappointment, was almost fully formed from the start. Mr. Yezzi quotes from a review by Richard Wilbur, who found in it “much of every virtue except passionate simplicity.” This is partly true, and Hecht himself came to agree. Thirteen years passed before Hecht’s second collection, “The Hard Hours,” galvanized the poetry world, especially with its terrifying poems of the war like “More Light! More Light!,” and won Hecht the Pulitzer Prize. He had suffered a complete breakdown after the failure of his marriage, including hospitalization, resulting in poems like “Behold the Lilies of the Field,” which juxtaposes modern psychotherapy to the flaying alive of a Roman emperor. There are also poems of great tenderness for his sons, including this from “It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It”:
And that their sleep be sound
I say this childermas
Who could not, at one time,
Have saved them from the gas.
Hecht’s final collection would be called “The Darkness and the Light” (2001), a title suggesting that the nightmares had not entirely abated, yet something else had intervened to redeem his life and change the nature of his writing. That was his 1971 marriage to Helen D’Alessandro, celebrated in his marvelous book “Millions of Strange Shadows” (1977). One of its best poems, “Peripeteia,” makes beautiful use of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” when a dream girl, “Miraculous Miranda,” steps from the stage to take his hand. The same book contains his most autobiographical poem, “Apprehensions,” recalling his brother’s epilepsy and their sadistic German governess. The ending recounts a dream eerily foreshadowing the Holocaust:
She would be seated by a table, reading
Under a lamp-shade of the finest parchment.
She would look up and say, “I always knew
That you would come to me, that you’d come home.”
In his dream, he reads a German text over her shoulder: “An old song of comparative innocence, / Until one learns to read between the lines.”
If the poet’s life from his second marriage to his death in 2004 seemed a series of triumphs and blessings, including the birth of his son Evan, Hecht never slackened in poetic ambition. There is something remarkable and worth keeping in each of his subsequent collections, from the narratives of “The Venetian Vespers” (1979) to the elegies and his harrowing sestina, “The Book of Yolek,” in “The Transparent Man” (1990). Mr. Hoy is right to reproduce the woodcuts by Leonard Baskin that inspired some of Hecht’s poems, like “The Presumptions of Death,” the opening sequence of “Flight Among the Tombs” (1996).
Readers will differ in their own responses to individual works, but no other recent poet in English has left us such an abundant display of what a certain kind of talent—ironic, formal, elegant—can do. He was my teacher and friend, which leaves me echoing what he said of his friend Joseph Brodsky: “Reader, dwell with his poems.”
Mr. Mason is the author of “Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us?”
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