Collected Poems by Anthony Hecht. Knopf, 2023. 640 pp. $50.00 (hardback)

Great poetry, as poets as distinct as Walt Whitman and William Butler Yeats have asserted, often emerges from internal contradiction. The fusion of opposites, or their uneasy coexistence, can provide insight into the work itself, particularly if that work is Anthony Hecht’s. There have been few American poets more apparently conflicted in temperament and sensibility. The ornate, allusive style with which his career began (and to which he returned in later books, even as he expanded his register) is bejeweled with adjectives like “pearly” and “opalescent.” The stanzas he employed, with their mixed meters and complex rhyme schemes, give the impression of durable, polished, faceted artifacts. Seldom has there been a poet so enamored with the proper adjective—“Parian,” “Tennysonian,” “Vesalian,” and “Pegasian” are just a few examples. For those with a sweet tooth for this kind of language, Hecht’s work provides boundless delights, even if the poems sometimes sound too self-consciously literary. Take this stanza from “‘Gladness of the Best,’” his inexplicably Frenchified tribute to George Herbert:

This mealed and sprinkled glittering, this park
Of “flowres delice” and Gobelin millefleurs
          Coiling upon the dark
In wild tourbillions, gerbs and golden falls
          Is a mere lace or grille
Before which Jesus works his miracles
Of love, feeding the poor, curing the ill,
Here in the Duc de Berry’s Très Riches Heures;

Hecht was an aesthete among aesthetes, but a moral imperative to acknowledge the cruelty and suffering of others is what sets his work apart from the many extraordinary accomplishments of his contemporaries—and what raises it to the level of great art.

Anthony Hecht’s Collected Poems (Knopf, 2023) and David Yezzi’s biography Late Romance: Anthony Hecht—A Poet’s Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2023) appeared to general acclaim and a loud note of dissent from David Orr of the New York Times. “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,” Orr writes reductively, even as he identifies the central contradiction of Hecht’s character and literary output. Hecht remained a traditionalist to the end, but starting with his second book, The Hard Hours (1967), he expanded his diction and prosody to accommodate increasingly grim subject matter:

And I was tied to a post and made to watch
When he was taken out and flogged by one of their generals
And then forced to offer his ripped back
As a mounting block for the barbarian king
To get on his horse;
And one time to get down on all fours to be the royal throne
When the king received our ambassadors
To discuss the question of ransom.
Of course, he didn’t want ransom.
And I was tied to a post and made to watch.

There’s nothing “filigreed” about the lines above. With its halting rhythm and nervous repetitions, “Behold the Lilies of the Field” represents Hecht’s most extreme and successful turn away from his own mandarin tendencies. The form, such as the poem has one, is that of a talk therapy session; the subject is the torture and execution of the Roman emperor Valerian. The anachronistic tension between form and content heightens the reader’s sense that this ancient war crime is in some sense a stand-in for those of the twentieth century. Though the speaker stops just short of describing the act of flaying, the poem is no less harrowing for it.

Anthony Hecht was born in 1923 to second-generation Bavarian Jewish immigrants whose own parents had found considerable financial success in banking and the manufacture of leather goods. Hecht’s family remained relatively untouched by the Great Depression, and there’s no evidence, despite his complaints of “The dusty gleam of temporary wealth,” that Hecht ever struggled financially. He attended private schools (the source, apparently, of his posh and British-sounding accent) and visited Europe before and after the stock market crash of 1929, enjoying a privileged but gloomy childhood, shaped by his younger brother Roger’s epilepsy, his parents’ depression, his father’s suicide attempts, and casual antisemitism. He matriculated at Bard and, later, Kenyon College, where he fell under the influence of the New Critics Allen Tate and John Crow Ransom and began to write poetry in earnest.

Enlistment in the army interrupted his postsecondary education, and war became the defining experience of his life and poetry. The carnage he saw in Germany during and after the second world war was seared into his consciousness; later in life, he spoked openly about his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. He witnessed the liberation of the Flossenbürg concentration camp and translated the testimonies of survivors into English. To say that such horrors tempered his rarefied sensibility would be crass, but the Holocaust undoubtedly left him with a strong sense of cultural responsibility—a need to claim his own Jewishness, to elegize and elevate his people in the wake of the Third Reich. More expansively, Hecht sought to account for, if not understand, what he calls in one early poem “The Place of Pain in the Universe.” Much later in his career, Hecht set out the “Terms” of his poetics in the deft canzone of that title. Dedicated to Derek Walcott, a poet known for writing about colonial violence, the poem’s meditations on artistic representation grow darker and more ambivalent with each line and each reappearance (or homophonic variation) of the five end-words that dictate its form:

                                        …painters grace
A woman’s grief, a beggar’s bowl, with close
Clear scrutiny until a world has grown
Out of Rembrandt’s pain and a narrow ghetto’s groan.

To “grace,” in this context, means to embellish, and despite Hecht’s admiration of the painter’s “close / Clear scrutiny,” the suggestion that the scene has been sentimentalized sits uneasily with him, even as he reproduces it in writing. As the poem swirls toward its bleak conclusion, he folds in the story of Noah’s Ark and reimagines the postdiluvian world as an aesthetic paradise from which we’ve been expelled:

It seemed a place where beast and human grace
A pastoral landscape, a Virgilian peace,
Or scene such as Mantegna’s masterpiece
Of kneeling shepherds. But that dream has grown
Threadbare, improbable, and our paupers groan
While “stockpiled warheads guarantee our peace,”
And troops, red-handed, muscle in for the close.
Ours is a wound that bleeds and will not close.

“The classics can console,” Walcott famously wrote. “But not enough.” Even so, Hecht never stopped seeking consolation, even salvation, in the arts, and he held up European culture as a momentary stay against human depravity.

Much has been written about the stylistic leap between Hecht’s first collection, A Summoning of Stones (1954) and The Hard Hours, especially now that the Collected Poems have made the entirety of the former volume widely available for the first time since its original publication. Hecht once referred to the poems in the book as “the work of an advanced apprentice,” but if he wasn’t yet fully formed as a poet in Stones, the qualities that would go on to distinguish his verse—mastery of rhyme and meter, a capacious vocabulary, and a tragicomic outlook—existed in embryo. Like many poets, Hecht often wrote on gardens, but even these pastorals bristle with temptation, violence, and disease, as in “La Condition Botanique”:

     …pipes, like Satan masquerading as the snake,
Coil and uncoil their frightful liquid length, and make
  Gurglings of love mixed with a rumbling sound
       Of sharp intestinal distress—

Its companion piece, “The Gardens of Villa D’Este,” contains a description of a fountain that might have made Richard Wilbur blush:

        Marble the fish that puke
      Eternally, marble the lips
   Of gushing naiads, pleased to ridicule
Adonis, marble herself, and larger than life-sized,
Untouched by Venus, posthumously circumcised
   Patron of Purity; and any fool
      Who feels no flooding at the hips
        These spendthrift stones rebuke.

“Puke” sits uneasily within the inversions and distended syntax of this decidedly unsexy stanza, but the flash of vulgarity hints at the sublime disruptions to come.

This first collection introduces blood as Hecht’s central leitmotif, particularly in the poems “A Deep Breath at Dawn” and “A Roman Holiday.” The latter, an epistolary poem indebted to late Yeats and early Lowell, repeats the word “blood” six times in its concluding stanzas and establishes the word’s peculiar resonance in Hecht’s work:

                              Blood repeats its tune
Loudly against my eardrums as I write,
And recollects what they were made to pay
Who out of worship put their swords away.

The poem ends, “The blood of Remus whispers out of wells.” Blood is hardly a scarce commodity in modern poetry, and this poem draws from its obvious symbolic associations—historical violence and Christian redemption. But the word “whispers” hints at secrets contained within the blood, a far darker vision that owes as much to Watson and Crick as it does to the Gospels. In “A Letter,” a wrenching poem of unrequited love from The Hard Hours, the poet is still listening intently as his blood “talks to itself all night, like a sliding moonlit sea.” And in Hecht’s third book, Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), more of the blood’s secrets begin to surface, as in “Green: An Epistle,” whose subject might be described as the metaphysics of evolutionary biology. A child looking at protozoa under a microscope sees intimations of humanity’s beginnings:

Those humble, floating ones, those simple cells
Content to be borne on whatever tide,
Trustful, the very image of consent—
These are the frail, unlikely origins,
Scarcely perceived, of all you shall become.

“Green” stands as one of Hecht’s strangest and most difficult poems; it has the air of an idea not fully expressed, or even one not quite worked out in the poet’s mind. As far as I can tell, it’s the only poem for which Hecht felt the need to write not one, but two prose glosses, in letters to baffled friends which are helpfully cross-referenced in the footnotes to this edition; to L. E. Sissman he declared, “the poem…presents a conception of nature as possibly malign.” That Hecht felt the need to defend and explicate “Green” at such length is a testament to both the poem’s aesthetic shortcomings and the importance of its thematic concerns to its author, concerns which would be explored more thoroughly in the glories of The Venetian Vespers (1979).

Millions of Strange Shadows also contains one of Hecht’s worst poems, “A Lot of Night Music,” in which Hecht the Crank makes his first unwelcome appearance. The poem starts off beautifully, then collapses into a wreckage of cringey puns and unfunny scatological humor:

          Above, the moon at large,
Muse-goddess, slightly polluted by the runs
          Of American astronauts,
(Poor, poxed Diana, laid open to the charge
          Of social Actaeons)
Mildly solicits our petty cash and thoughts.

          At once with their votive mites,
Out of the woods and woodwork poets come,
          Hauling their truths and booty,
Each one a Phosphor, writing by his own lights,
          And with a diesel hum
Of mosquitoes, or priests, proffer their wordy duty.

Hecht goes on to rail against “Those [who] laugh and rejoice / At liberation from the bonds of gender, / Race, morals and mind.” It’s remarkable how little the governing academic ideologies of American poetry—feminism, Marxism, confessionalism, identity politics—have changed in the decades since this poem’s publication; if anything, these “-isms” now occupy a higher place in the academic hierarchy than literature itself. I find it hard not to sympathize with Hecht’s frustration—to a point. Here is one of the most accomplished poets of his generation, already a Pulitzer winner, telling the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn, in a smug, acerbic, chummy idiom reserved for men of a certain class and stature. (Those with a taste for this sort of humor can find much more in A Bountiful Harvest: The Correspondence of Anthony Hecht and William L. MacDonald, also edited by Philip Hoy, which contains an assortment of Hecht’s bawdy limericks not included in the Collected Poems.) Hecht can be witty and even campy when he turns his attention to subjects other than literature, but the tired jokes of “Night Music” barely conceal the insecurity of an artist who felt that his reputation as a Dead White Male was already sealed.

There’s nothing wrong with a poet criticizing the work of his contemporaries in his verse. In Richard Wilbur’s “Children of Darkness,” a poem from the same time in a similar vein, forest fungi serve as stand-ins for the Confessional poets, then dying by suicide with appalling frequency. The poem’s cheeky final words, “They are good,” can be read as either an affirmation or condemnation of their work, but the more one reads, the harsher its judgment seems. Ironically, Wilbur’s allegory succeeds because of his refusal to sacrifice the realism of his ostensible subject for the sake of the poem’s figurative language. Hecht lacked the delicate touch required to pull off a conceit this effective; whether he was writing about firing squads or toilets, his poetic voice was bold and brash, and the unflinching depictions of warfare and ham-fisted attempts at comedy in his work spring from the same source.

Ever a disciple of the New Criticism, Hecht also sought ways to escape himself in his verse, most successfully in his fourth book, The Venetian Vespers. Though it contains some of Hecht’s most powerful short lyrics (among them “Auspices,” “An Overview,” and “Persistences”), the book is anchored by blank verse narratives, of which the longest is the title poem. “The Venetian Vespers,” a dramatic monologue in the voice of a disaffected American expat and World War II veteran living in Venice, is certainly the best of Hecht’s longer poems and at once his most singular and representative work. “Vespers” encompasses his most pressing themes and subjects: combat, PTSD, religious art, loneliness, the plight and prosperity of immigrants in America, the beauty and terror of the natural world, and no less than the origins of humankind. The poem opens tentatively, teasing us with the question “Where to begin?” and offering a litany of answers in the form of beautiful but initially confusing imagery. It takes until the second page for the speaker to point toward the human drama at the center of the poem, with exquisitely controlled aimlessness:

Yes, but also the sight, on a gray morning,
Beneath the crossbar of an iron railing
Painted a glossy black, of six water drops
Slung in suspension, sucking into themselves
As if it were some morbid nourishment,
The sagging blackness of the rail itself,
But edged with brilliant fingernails of chrome
In which the world was wonderfully disfigured
Like faces seen in spoons, like mirrorings
In the fine spawn, the roe of air bubbles,
That tiny silver wampum along the stems,
Yellowed and magnified, of aging flowers
Caught in the lens of stale water and glass
In the upstairs room when somebody had died.

Hecht’s affinity for long, sinuous sentences was scarcely ever better served than in this passage, an elaboration on (and eventually an inversion of) one of Thomas Hardy’s favorite images: water drops hanging after rain- or dewfall. (One of Hecht’s early lyrics, “Spring for Thomas Hardy,” which he chose not to reprint later in life, employs the stanza form of Hardy’s “Weathers,” which takes note of “drops on gate-bars hang[ing] in a row.”) The lines on reflection and its powers of distortion brilliantly enact the reversal of Hecht’s imagery, as “mirrorings” bridges the semantic gap between the suspended drops and the air bubbles collecting on submerged stems of flowers, and the speaker shifts his gaze from a vivid but generalized natural object to a particular moment. The passage also suggests another kind of reflection: the meandering progress of memory, and its seeming indifference to what it retains and what it allows to slip away. These are central concerns for the poem on both a thematic and a technical level, as the speaker’s personal history unfolds in some of Hecht’s best pentameters.

The “somebody” mentioned coyly at the end of the above sentence turns out to be the speaker’s mother, who dies suddenly and without explanation in his childhood. Years later (having been abandoned by his father and raised by his uncle, whose generous “annuity” accounts for the poem’s opulent setting), the speaker questions his paternity in these haunting lines:

I shall pay out the forfeit with my life
In my own lingering way. Just as my uncle,
Who, my blood tells me on its nightly rounds,
May perhaps be “a little more than kin,”
Has paid the price for his unlawful grief
And bloodless butchery by creating me
His guilty legatee, the beneficiary
Of his money and his crimes.

Even here, at the poem’s grand conclusion, the diction is cagey, as if the speaker can’t come right out and admit that his “uncle” was really his father. Yet the truth is encoded in two Shakespearean references: the first from Hamlet (in double quotes above) and the second an echo of The Merchant of Venice, when the speaker laments in the poem’s final line that he “was never even, at one time, a wise child.” The original proverb (“played on” by Shakespeare, as the footnotes inform us) reads: “It is a wise child that knows its own father.”

Dense with allusion, “The Venetian Vespers” is perhaps the greatest testament to Hecht’s vast learning—a memory palace of a poem. But the speaker’s status as a sort of armchair man of letters was not the only component drawn from life; Hecht also bestows upon him some of his most traumatic wartime experiences, which are no less troubling for the transfiguring fiction that surrounds them. He contends, in a passage Philip Larkin might have agreed with, that happiness “is composed / Of clouded, cataracted, darkened sight, / Merciful blindnesses and ignorance.” Even the Maury-style domestic melodrama at the heart of the poem seems to have originated from Hecht’s personal life: his son Jason, from his boozy and adulterous first marriage to Patricia Harris, is almost certainly not biologically his.

The speaker’s gradual reveal of his probable illegitimacy sends us back to the poem’s opening, with its “Where to begin?” mantra and nightmarish catalogue, including an echo of a poem by Hecht’s one-time colleague Sylvia Plath, “Two Views of a Cadaver Room” (“Gray bottled babies in formaldehyde / As in their primal amniotic bath”), and “The terrifying and unmeaning rictus / Of the sandshark’s stretched, involuntary grin.” Each of these images carries its own weight of subtext, but the collective effect of that first long verse paragraph recalls Hecht’s earlier comment on “Green: An Epistle”: “a conception of nature as possibly malign.” The speaker’s own murky beginnings have poisoned his worldview since childhood:

                    …Still, there were prizes
For papers in my English class: Carlyle
On The Dignity of Labor; John Stuart Mill
On Happiness. But the origin of things
Lies elsewhere. Back in some genetic swamp.

The titles of the English papers are an exercise in self-mockery, the speaker conscious that neither honest work nor happiness have much to do with the life he has led. By the poem’s final section, he has dehumanized himself as both a “viral parasite” and “the dying host by which [viruses] live.” There is something almost comic in his self-portrait as “A singular Tyrannosaurus Rex [Hoy has happily corrected Hecht’s original misspelling, though it should still technically read Tyrannosaurus rex] / Sauntering toward extinction,” but the dinosaur’s cartoonish presence does little to alleviate the bleakness of the poem’s conclusion, even as it courts cliché.

Why, then, does the reader emerge from “The Venetian Vespers” with an impression of radiance? In the end, the power of the speaker’s language, the many densely descriptive lyric passages in this resolutely narrative poem, may be all the redemption his privileged but unforgiving life, misshapen by mental illness and personal tragedy, has to offer him. When the speaker reaches the glass furnaces of Murano, Hecht gives us what seems an oblique comment on his own poetry:

They take the first crude bulb of thickened glass,
Glowing and taffy-soft on the blow tube,
And sink it in a mold, a metal cup
Spiked on its inner surface like a pineapple.
Half the glass now is regularly dimpled,
And when these dimples are covered with a glaze
Of molten glass they are prisoned air bubbles,
Breathless, enameled pearly vacancies.

James Merrill, Hecht’s contemporary and an acknowledged influence on “Vespers,” concludes his travel poem “Days of 1971” with a glimpse of “what we saw made / At Murano, and you gave to me— / Two ounces of white heat / Twirled and tweezered into shape.” As in Hecht’s lines, the glassmaker’s creation becomes a figure for the poem itself, although the two passages remain distinct from each other in tone and pacing. Merrill, preoccupied with the memory of a past love affair with his travel companion (who is also the poem’s addressee), imparts considerable kinetic energy to his subject, emphasizing the heat, volatility, and potential danger of the glassmaker’s raw material, as well as the urgent need to shape it into something beautiful before it hardens into unuseability. By contrast, the process described in “Vespers” is languid and honey-slow, rich with long vowels and descriptors like “thickened” and “taffy-soft.” The mold has clear parallels to the poetic forms in which Hecht liked to “sink” the stuff of his wit, learning, imagination, and experience, and the passage is one of many in the poem that dramatize the act of artistic creation in their elaborate, patient imagery—language that never rises to the level of allegory or argument, but remains richly suggestive and figurative. Though Hecht describes the mold-pouring with veneration, he also acknowledges the limitations of art, or of the art he has set out to produce. The “air bubbles” bring us back to that initial description of funeral flowers and the surreal procession of images that precedes it; but here, “prisoned” in glass, they are only “Breathless, enameled pearly vacancies,” a line I’m surprised that none of Hecht’s worst critics ever seems to have used against him. It’s easy to misread its subdued sense of accomplishment, its vulnerability, as self-indictment. The speaker acknowledges the deathly stasis that results from the completion of a work of art without condemning it—rather the “breathless” bubbles mesmerize him. The line is memorable for its freedom from the chitinous insecurity that hobbles some of Hecht’s other meditations on the nature of art.
The concluding description of what Harold Bloom characterized as “an irrealistic yet authentic Venetian sunset” is among the most memorable sunsets in American poetry. It rivals similar passages in Bishop, Merrill, and Stevens:

Streaks of electrum richly underline
The slow, flat-bottomed hulls, those floated lobes
Between which quills and spokes of light fan out
Into carnelian reds and nectarines,
Nearing a citron brilliance at the center,
The searing furnace of the glory hole
That fires and fuses clouds of muscatel
With pencilings of gold.

As elsewhere in the poem, an allusion (not mentioned in Hoy’s footnoes) holds the key to the passage. The somewhat obscure reference is to the conclusion of canto XI of Stevens’s “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: “The propounding of four seasons and twelve months / The brilliancy at the central of the earth.” Throughout his poetry, Stevens speaks of the sun in quasi-theistic terms as the ultimate origin of all life (“Not as a god, but as a god might be,” as he wrote more famously in “Sunday Morning”), a stance Hecht adopts as he braids the two major themes of his poem into a single stunning resolution. “The searing furnace of the glory hole” brings us back to the glassmaker’s craft and its implications for Hecht’s poetry, while also crediting the sun as the source of all creation and, by extension, all artifice, as Stevens does in his late lyric “The Planet on the Table” (“…his poems, although makings of his self, / Were no less makings of the sun”). Yet this fusion of artistic and biological genesis is immediately undercut by the very line that enables it. Hecht was too attuned to language to use “glory hole” innocently in a poem, even in the context of glassblowing. His earlier poem “The Man Who Married Magdalene” demonstrates that he was well versed in the term’s double meaning, a hole between bathroom stalls allowing for anonymous sex between men:

And you can get a blow-job
Where other men have pissed
In the little room that’s sacred
To the Evangelist—

If you’re inclined that way.

This connotation contributes both an orgasmic intensity (“searing”) and an ironic sterility to the passage in “Vespers,” for the sex act referenced is recreational rather than procreative, casting doubt on the creative possibilities offered in these lines and hinting at the speaker’s sexual orientation, which remains undisclosed in the poem. I am reminded of Hart Crane’s cry to the muse (“Yes, Eve—wraith of my unloved seed!”) in “Southern Cross,” a poem that laments the “lithic trillions” of her “spawn”—presumably, the poems resulting from the strange and loveless union between the homosexual poet and the abstracted female figure who haunts his epic. The speaker of “The Venetian Vespers” takes a similarly stony view, knowing that neither the beauty of the scene nor the rhetorical splendor of its description can redeem his fallen state: he seems to have already rejected the very possibility of redemption at the start of the poem. But his fatalism cannot stop him from taking refuge in what few pleasures he knows, as even the most wretched among us do for the sake of survival.

The other narrative poems of The Venetian Vespers offer pleasures as well, though none rival the title poem in its power and complexity. Encouraged by the success of the volume, Hecht produced more long poems, which appeared in his next book, The Transparent Man, released alongside Collected Earlier Poems in 1990. The title poem and the dark travelogue “See Naples and Die” continue Hecht’s forays into blank verse narratives, with mostly happy results. The terminally ill female narrator of “The Transparent Man” was inspired, Hecht said, by his friend Flannery O’Connor and her “gallant” composure in the face of her own premature death. On the other hand, “See Naples and Die” is a sort of spiritual sequel to “The Venetian Vespers,” set in a different Italian city but featuring an American narrator with a comparable knowledge of art, literature, and history. Although it’s a little too long and lacks the impacted density of “Vespers,” there are many memorable passages, such as this lunch served at the opening of the poem:

                                              Slowly our eyes
Make out his pyramids of delicacies—
The Celtic coils and curves of primrose shrimp,
A speckled gleam of opalescent squid,
The mussel’s pearl-blue niches, as unearthly
As Brazilian butterflies, and the gray turbot,
Like a Picasso lady with both eyes
On one side of her face.

William Logan, reviewing this volume for the New York Times in 1990, quoted these lines with approval, while taking issue with Hecht’s longer poems in general:

Mr. Hecht has achieved most at the length and intensity of the lyric, in poems that can be brought to perfection. He is weaker at narrative, and his long dramatic monologues lack the stress of structure; they are dignified, gorgeous in patches, but rambling and never fully rendered. And when he writes in the voice of a chambermaid at an Alpine resort; or about a pillowy alcoholic, Shirley Carson, and her husband, Kit; or, in the title poem of his new book, as a woman dying of leukemia, he cannot for all his sympathies escape an undertone of condescension.

Logan’s reservations are fair and embedded in a review that is otherwise lush with praise. Even so, by Logan’s account, the review deeply wounded the poet, and Hecht wrote short for the rest of his life.

The closest thing to a long poem in Hecht’s penultimate collection, Flight Among the Tombs (1996), is the sequence “The Presumptions of Death.” Distinct from the Browning-esque pomp of his earlier dramatic monologues, these poems are much closer to what are called (a little cloyingly) “persona poems” in today’s workshops, where they have multiplied like cane toads. They are typically short lyrics, no longer than a page or two, and inhabit voices that are more overtly self-reflexive and artificial than those found in dramatic monologues. “The Personifications of Death” would have been a more literal title for Hecht’s sequence, which moves through an array of guises, “Death the Whore,” “Death the Punchinello,” and “Death the Carnival Barker” among them. In their humor, offhandedness, and irreverence, as well as their place among Hecht’s works, they recall the “Crazy Jane” poems of Yeats’s late sequence “Words for Music Perhaps.” “Death Riding Into Town” begins:

Here comes Clint Eastwood riding into town,
     One of the horsey Four
Of the Apocalypse, who won renown
     With Famine, Plague and War.

In general, however, Hecht’s gifts began to flag in his final years. In Flight Among the Tombs and its successor, The Darkness and the Light (2001), the near perfect lyrics become increasingly uncommon, while the technical fumbles add up. Hecht’s rhymes become sloppy: in “La-Bás: A Trance,” we get “airborne” and “turban,” and in “Mirror,” “dusk” and “must.” Many of the poems in these two volumes (along with a handful of uncollected poems) originally appeared in The Gehenna Florilegium (1998), a limited-edition chapbook on botanical themes, containing 16 original woodcuts by Hecht’s friend and frequent collaborator, Leonard Baskin. (Why these prints aren’t reproduced in the Collected Poems, as are those that appeared in The Hard Hours and Flight Among the Tombs, is a mystery; a copy of the original publication can be purchased online at the low price of $7,500.) These lyrics rarely inhabit their subjects in full; often we need the footnotes to determine which flowers they’re referring to. The reference may be as brief as a single word in the final line of the poem, as in the bleakly imagistic “Despair”:

                                      …Midafternoon
Washes the worn bank of a dry arroyo,
Its ocher crevices, unrelieved rusts,
Where a startled lizard pauses, nervous, exposed
To the full glare of relentless marigold sunshine.

Hecht’s last collection also contains poems drawn from biblical stories, and their flat, declarative language makes them considerably less convincing than the nature lyrics of the Florilegium:

All men seemed stupid in their lecherous,
Self-flattering appetites, which I found repugnant.
But at last, as fate would have it, I found a chance
To put my curse to practical advantage.

Such passages are tiresome in isolation; in bulk, they are nearly unbearable. Readers with the fortitude to slog through the book, however, will find themselves rewarded with a small, perfect lyric at the end, one of Hecht’s most beautiful, “‘The Darkness and the Light Are Both Alike to Thee.’” The poem concludes:

Like the elderly and frail
Who’ve lasted through the night,
Cold brows and silent lips,
For whom the rising light
Entails their own eclipse,
Brightening as they fail.

Hecht employs the trimeter line with equal grace in two other poems, “Motes” and “Declensions,” written just before his own demise from cancer in 2004. Though grouped under the title “Interior Skies: Late Poems from Liguria,” the latter of the two poems looks outward, first to the mighty dead:

The ranks of poets, too,
Ronsard and Leopardi,
Forgather beside the Styx,
There to receive their due:
At eighty-eight went Hardy,
Keats not yet twenty-six.

and finally to Hecht’s own family, with a tenderness rare in his work:

Eyesight and hearing fade:
Yet I do not greatly care
If the grim-scythe-wielding thief
Pursue his larcenous trade,
Though anguished by the grief
Two that I love must bear.

Anthony Hecht’s poetry has always been far easier for me to admire than to love. His poems lack the congeniality of Elizabeth Bishop’s and the hospitality of Merrill’s, and their relentless darkness and formidable learning make them seem at times like things not to be read so much as brooded over. Yet there’s no denying their craftsmanship—Hecht (along with his most brilliant contemporaries, James Merrill, Daryl Hine, and Richard Wilbur) handled rhyme and meter with fluency and inventiveness rare in the poems of the many so-called “formalists” working today, so any valid criticism of Hecht’s writing must acknowledge this standard of excellence to which the author held himself.

For those with the patience (and stomach) to digest Hecht’s full oeuvre, Philip Hoy proves himself a worthy companion. The footnotes to his edition of the poems neither overestimate nor insult the reader’s intelligence: though Hoy translates the French, Latin, and German words which frequently appear in Hecht’s poems, he leaves all but the most obscure English words for us to look up elsewhere. Though for the most part the notes are short on details of Hecht’s personal life, they occasionally reveal information not divulged in David Yezzi’s biography—for instance, the darkly erotic early poem “The End of the Weekend” was inspired by a story Hecht heard from Ted Hughes about a weekend he spent with Sylvia Plath, and Hecht’s first wife, Patricia Harris, is still alive as of 2023.

There’s another component of Hoy’s edition I haven’t yet seen mentioned in critical appraisals. Most if not all archival recordings of Hecht reading from his work were repurposed for the audiobook of the Collected Poems, with Hoy reading the poems for which no recordings exist, an undertaking which no doubt required ample additional research as well as audio editing and mastering, though Hoy does not mention this in the acknowledgments. Hecht’s artificial, notoriously British-sounding accent contributes a theatrical element to the readings which not all will appreciate; indeed, I find his r’s—so rolled as to sound like d’s—insufferable. But when Hecht’s voice is placed alongside that of an actual Englishman, his American tones become easier to identify, as when the speaker of “The Venetian Vespers” lingers over “The ocher pastes and puddings of dogshit.” It should be noted as well that Hoy’s performances are remarkably lucid and even-handed, with the editor’s voice smoothing over even Hecht’s most egregious clunkers. Any posthumous edition of a poet’s works should speak to its readers as the poet would have in life, and Hoy deserves as much praise for unearthing Hecht’s voice as he does for his curation of this volume.