Anthony Hecht’s poetic vision

Having the collected poems of Anthony Hecht should allow us to see that his work, central to 20th-century American poetry, is all of a piece. It is unified by the sacrifice at the heart of modern history, the Holocaust—a subject to which Hecht . . . returns isn’t the right word exactly. It is a subject that emerges, organizes, stares out from, haunts, limns, and throws into relief Hecht’s often classically proportioned, courtly, and virtuosic verses, baroque bronzes with molten cores, dances—for they are always in motion—of mordant postures and sprezzatura, the black humor of the tarantella, the ghostly wit of the minuet, and the waltz with its studied and surprising intimacy.

The singular excellence of each poem as verse might distract from the overall excellence of the poet’s work. In fact, Hecht is the most distinguished heir to the poetry of W. H. Auden. Like him, Hecht employs a variety of verse forms to bear witness to history. Many poets of Hecht’s generation suffered in the shadow of Auden, but Hecht thrived there and made art with a depth of feeling we might sometimes miss from Auden’s work. Hecht made a poetry that is distinctly his own, outstanding and original as his own witness. We can see that now.

Perhaps Hecht’s most famous poem is “A Hill,” the first poem in his second book, The Hard Hours. Much ink has been spilled at the foot of this mysterious vision, which according to the poem appears to the speaker on a sunny day in Rome, where our American (I choose to think of him as Hecht’s representative when a fellow of the American Academy of Rome, a position held by Hecht in 1952) is enjoying the day with a group of friends, “Picking my way through a warm sunlit piazza,” when a vision of “plain bitterness” interrupts his pleasure. A hill appears, “mole-colored and bare,” in a desolate winter landscape where the trees are like “old ironwork gathered for scrap / Outside a factory wall,” replacing “the great Farnese Palace.” All his memory does in the poem, apparently, is to recall a similar hill outside Poughkeepsie, New York, where for some reason he stood “for hours in wintertime.”