[Orwn Acra]

Dave's review is obviously better if you want to know more about the poet and the book. Orr's is more like using the book as an excuse to publish an opinion piece, which seems to be a trend among reviews (my own book being on the receiving end of this kind).

Cameron highlights an interesting point that Orr makes, and one that I have noticed among Hecht's work, as well as and by extension Wilbur's. Orr alludes to whatever reason it is that I do not find Hecht, or usually Wilbur, moving, whether emotionally or spiritually, despite the many allusions to the war or religion.

[Roger Slater]

Wilbur's "The Pardon" is the only poem of his that I think is powerfully emotional. It's a great poem, my favorite of his. Though the quieter emotion of poems like "Love Call Us to the Things of This World" is (for me) hard to deny. The soul descending to accept the waking body is original and works for me quite well. Hecht, on the other hand, I've never been able to bond with. Would Hecht fans please single out one or two starter poems that might hook me?

[Jack Land]

Anthony Hecht by David Orr, NYT 12-12-23

To write about the poet Anthony Hecht in 2024 is to invite the question of why, in 2024, anyone is writing about the poet Anthony Hecht. His work is so wildly out of step with contemporary practice that it seems almost to come from another, possibly fictional timeline — one in which poets could recite long passages from “Lycidas” from memory and would, of their own free will, be photographed wearing bow ties.

A typical Hecht poem will revolve around a cultural reference that the average reader has barely heard of, like the Witch of Endor, who raises the spirit of the prophet Samuel in the Old Testament. Will that poem be a sonnet? Oh yes. Will that sonnet adhere strictly to the form, including a blank line between the octet and the sestet? Oh yes. Will it quote Shakespeare? Oh yes. Will it involve the words “sortilege” and “thaumaturges”? You bet. Will its last line include the word “engastrimythic” (which means “ventriloquized”)? Yes, and it should be noted that Microsoft Word’s spell-check refuses to recognize this adjective, as if technology itself were saying, “Anthony Hecht, did you write this poem with a quill, or what?”

At this point, you may be wondering whether this review will be eight paragraphs of eye-rolling. Or you may be wondering whether the field will be reversed, and the unexpected merit of lines tricked out with words like “engastrimythic” will become clear. Neither of these things will happen. Hecht’s career is emblematic of a tension at the core of poetry — especially poetry in the United States — and that tension deserves explanation and sympathetic understanding.

Both enterprises are aided by a couple of new books. The first is Hecht’s “Collected Poems,” edited by Philip Hoy, which includes all seven of his individual collections in order (always the best way to present a poet), as well as a handful of poems published in a posthumous volume and some uncollected work. The other is “Late Romance: Anthony Hecht — A Poet’s Life,” a biography by the poet and critic David Yezzi that delivers the desired curiosities (Hecht was once warned about the perils of a life in poetry by Dr. Seuss! He once stole a girl from a young Marlon Brando!) while maintaining a gratifying focus on the poetry.

Hecht, who died in 2004, is usually tagged with words like “mandarin” and “formalist” and grouped into a cadre of American poets born in the 1920s that includes Richard Wilbur and James Merrill. But in many ways, Hecht was different. He was Jewish, for one thing, an identity that, when Hecht was a young man, was fraught not only in the world of American literature (then under the spell of T.S. Eliot), but in many of the country’s elite spaces. As Yezzi notes, when Hecht was preparing to attend Bard, his father suggested he “change his name to something less Jewish sounding, to avoid discrimination.”
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The Second World War was the lodestone of Hecht’s poetry, if not his life. He served in combat units but deliberately never shot at anyone, a decision that gave him, as Yezzi writes, “an excruciating sense of moral compromise.” Because of his language skills, Hecht was assigned to translate interviews after the liberation of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Yezzi quotes a letter Hecht wrote to his parents: “What I have seen and heard here, in conversations with Germans, French, Czechs and Russians — plus personal observations — combines to make a story well beyond the limits of censorship regulations. You must wait till I can tell you personally of this beautiful country and its demented people.”

The poems that stemmed from this horrific experience are the ones typically reproduced in anthologies, particularly “‘More Light! More Light!’,” which quotes words attributed to Goethe on his deathbed. Extreme subjects don’t always have to be paired with extreme forms or diction — poetry isn’t a toddler’s shape sorter — but it’s hard to read this work today without feeling a sense of mismatch, as grim scenes are delivered in filigreed writing. If a gun is about to be used to murder someone, it will have “hovered lightly in its glove.” If a bunch of killers are loitering, they will “lounge in a studied mimicry of ease.” If a poem is exploring the history of European violence, we will also have a “timbered hill,” “blue shadows” and “the crisp light of winter.”
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Hecht’s best work allows his fluent intelligence to enter the scene, rather than to draw its curtains. This is notable in less dire poems like “Peripeteia,” but also in perhaps his best poem, “A Hill.” The speaker (figured as Hecht himself) is chatting comfortably with friends in a marketplace when abruptly, for no reason, the market vanishes and

in its place
Was a hill, mole-colored and bare. It was very cold,
Close to freezing, with a promise of snow.
The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap
Outside a factory wall. There was no wind,
And the only sound for a while was the little click
Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet.
I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,
But no other sign of life. And then I heard
What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed;
At least I was not alone. But just after that
Came the soft and papery crash
Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.

And that was all, except for the cold and silence
That promised to last forever, like the hill.

The vision of the hill ends, the market returns, but “for more than a week/I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen.” The betrayal in “‘More Light! More Light!’” is that when light is called for, no light appears. Here, the same lack of response seems bleaker, because there’s no betrayal at all — this is simply how things are. “At least I was not alone.” But he is alone; he’s always been alone.

This sense of aloneness — of loneliness, really — is the theme that runs through Hecht’s strongest writing and through Yezzi’s biography. Yezzi is alert to it: At one point he quotes the poet and critic Richard Howard, who remarks, “Tony always wanted to be a member of the club.” This longing was evident even in Hecht’s speaking voice, for which he cultivated a ludicrously plummy accent that made him sound like Benedict Cumberbatch. When Hecht was inducted into what is now the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he altered his suits, Yezzi notes, so that he could wear “the badge of membership, a ‘gaudy rosette,’ in his buttonhole.” It’s hard to know whether to feel depressed, charmed or faintly embarrassed by this revelation.

But all those responses apply equally to poetry itself. The question for poets is always, “How do I write poetry?” — and for a long time, the answer, provided in part by Eliot, was, “By knowing a lot about poetic tradition and making a show of it.” It’s not the most obvious answer (the more one thinks about it, the stranger it seems). But for Hecht’s generation, it was a reliable answer that led to measurable rewards, and it did so because a cohort of poets, editors and critics agreed that it would. This is the nature and temptation of period style: It offers a way to write and also a way to be seen as a writer, to be “a member of the club.”

Yet the question “How do I write poetry?” and the question “How can I be seen and respected as a poet?” aren’t the same. In fact, they’re frequently in tension, because the preferences of the “club” are so twisted by that group’s tiny size and self-dealing that to satisfy them often says more about acceptability than artistry. Each club — and American poetry has had many — praises its members’ small, speech-imitating creations, and yet suddenly, inevitably, the cold hill appears, and your fellow engastrimyths vanish along with their talking dolls. What speaks instead then is the empty air, and what it says is: “You’re alone. How do you feel about that?”

COLLECTED POEMS: Including Late and Uncollected Work | By Anthony Hecht | Edited by Philip Hoy | Knopf | 611 pp. | $50

LATE ROMANCE: Anthony Hecht — A Poet’s Life | By David Yezzi | St. Martin’s | 469 pp. | $40

[Cally Conan-Davies]

.......................

[W T Clark]

(Gosh how I hate that "Ghost in the Martini". That, isn't poetry to me: More light, less dicklight!)

[Orwn Acra]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

Wilbur's "The Pardon" is the only poem of his that I think is powerfully emotional. It's a great poem, my favorite of his. Though the quieter emotion of poems like "Love Call Us to the Things of This World" is (for me) hard to deny. The soul descending to accept the waking body is original and works for me quite well. Hecht, on the other hand, I've never been able to bond with. Would Hecht fans please single out one or two starter poems that might hook me?

I think "It Out Herods-Herod. Pray You Avoid It" is the one most people turn to. What interests me is why this poem leaves me cold while, just to compare it to another highly learned mid-century formalist poem also written in response to the Holocaust, Auden's "The Shield of Achilles" does not, a poem I find so moving I can recite parts from memory. Perhaps just the whims of taste...

[Matt Q]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

Would Hecht fans please single out one or two starter poems that might hook me?

Roger, I don't know Hecht that well, but I liked this one of his. It was on Cally's list, too. It's also one that doesn't seem to fit Orr's criticism of "grim scenes are delivered in filigreed writing" that Cameron and Walter have echoed.




Book of Yolek

Wir Haben ein Gesetz,
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben.*

The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail. It doesn't matter where to,
Just so you're weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.

You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home:
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.

The fifth of August, 1942.
It was the morning and very hot. It was the day
They came at dawn with rifles to The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.

How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven to,
And about the children, and how they were made to walk,
Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn't a day
Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.

We're approaching August again. It will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They all were forced to take that terrible walk.

Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day.
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you're sitting down to a meal.


* We have a law, and according to the law he must die.