Full Title: “Anthony Hecht strived to be on poetry’s A-list. He should be there. (Via Washington Post)”
On his deathbed, Anthony Hecht turned to his beloved wife, Helen, and said “I pray I shall be among the English poets.” These were, according to David Yezzi in “Late Romance: Anthony Hecht — A Poet’s Life,” his last words before drifting into a final sleep. Whether this dying wish will be granted only time will tell, but you can decide for yourself now: Simultaneous with Yezzi’s critical biography, a new one-volume edition of Hecht’s “Collected Poems,” edited by Philip Hoy, has just been published. Besides the six major collections issued during the American poet’s lifetime, it also contains late and uncollected work.
A consummate master of formal verse, Hecht was equally formal in his public persona. He dressed in well-cut, conservative suits, carefully coifed his hair, spoke with what many regarded as an English accent, and in later life sported a beard worthy of an Elizabethan cavalier. Among friends, however, he could unwind, especially after a martini, and could be quite funny, as some of his own light verse shows. Still, to judge by passages in his poetry and life story, Hecht would have called pride his own particular sin, along with its little cousin, envy.
Not that Hecht was ever precisely rivalrous: He profoundly admired the work of Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Richard Wilbur, Sylvia Plath, Joseph Brodsky and Anne Sexton — all of whom he knew and counted as friends. For him, they formed contemporary poetry’s A-list. But was he on it too?
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Link:
Washington Post | Anthony Hecht (Poetry Foundation)
