Table Of ContentOUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/15, SPi
A THICKNESS OF PARTICULARS
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/15, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/15, SPi
A THICKNESS OF
PARTICULARS
THE POETRY OF ANTHONY HECHT
JONATHAN F. S. POST
1
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For Susan
In memory of her mother Lydia Gallick (1913–2015)
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Preface
A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht grew out of a long
period of intensive work devoted to preparing an edition of Hecht’s
Selected Letters, which appeared in 2013, published by the Johns Hopkins
University Press. Before and concurrent with that project, I had the
pleasure of teaching Hecht’s poetry for a few years at Yale and many
at UCLA to undergraduates and graduate students alike; and long
before that, as a graduate student, I had the opportunity to study with
Hecht in a seminar on William Butler Yeats and Theodore Roethke at
the University of Rochester in 1972. I also house-sat while Hecht and
his family were away for a semester at Harvard, and although I can’t
claim any special knowledge or “ensorcelment,” as Hecht might say,
emanating from the walls of his well-decorated, spacious upstate home,
I made certain use of the many volumes in the Oxford poetry series in
his downstairs den for which I remain still grateful. Nor can I trace,
precisely, in this book more than a few points in the years of friendship
that followed until his death in 2004. Probably the most important was
developing an ear for the distinctive sound of his voice, the layering of
(at times gleefully boyish) humor that infiltrates his verse and offsets
and further enriches the darker broodings for which his poetry has
become justly famous. Hecht was always reticent about discussing his
poetry, modest to a fault I now rue. Sensing this, I was reluctant to ask
him many questions. We often exchanged our writings but usually in
printed form, an exchange I valued for, among other reasons, allowing
a friendship to continue to flourish while living on opposite coasts.
In any event, the best preparation for understanding his writings,
I came to discover, lay elsewhere, but it was in accord with the same
advice he frequently gave to younger poets setting forth: to read, and
in my case also to teach, as much poetry as possible, which I did, ini-
tially with concentration on the poets of the English Renaissance—as
it was then called—and the seventeenth century: Shakespeare, Donne,
Herbert, Milton, and Marvell, in particular, whose poetry in large
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viii preface
quantities Hecht had committed to memory and, as was true with many
poets of his generation, was foundational to much of his own work.
But, of course, this marked only a beginning with regard to a poet who
possessed a special knack for summoning spirits from the “vasty deep”
in strikingly new and original ways, as Christopher Ricks has deftly
explored of late.1
My own study draws frequently on Hecht’s letters, and as a conse-
quence, it offers something of a biographical context for understanding
his poetry, but its general purpose is not biography per se.2 That large
project is being pursued by David Yezzi. Mine is intended to form,
rather, an introduction to the poetry, attentive to its particular riches,
with an eye toward the whole career, and making special use of the
letters and his other critical writings as they cast light on these features.
This includes Anthony Hecht, in conversation with Philip Hoy (1998), Hecht’s
highly illuminating “autobiography,” a work I read immediately upon
publication but whose charms are such that I returned to it only after
having drafted my thoughts on a particular section. Although there
have been a number of specialized studies of Hecht’s writings, and, of
course, many reviews, there has been no book-length study of the
career—and indeed none was possible until recently, since Hecht was
active as a poet right up to his death in 2004.
Besides taking advantage of the letters, I have also made use of the
extensive materials in the Hecht Archive at Emory University, includ-
ing drafts of some of the poems. Although my study is meant to provide
an overview of the poet, and thus has a chronological cast to it, it also
includes several chapters offering thematic angles. One of these is on
the subject of ekphrasis. With good reason, Hecht has been called “our
most painterly poet,”3 a term that simultaneously reminds us of the
significant place works of art have in his poetry as well as his own
penchant for language often as steeped in color—in the rhetorical
sense—as it is exact in its phrasing. A second chapter traces the wide
1. Ricks, True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell under the Sign of
Eliot and Pound (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
2. For the convenience of the reader, I have included page references to those letters
included in my edition of The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht (Baltimore, MD: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), abbreviated hereafter as SL. Those without page
references are to letters that either remain in private hands or are in the Hecht Archive
and noted as such.
3. Robyn Creswell, “Painting and Privacy: On Anthony Hecht,” Raritan 21 (Winter,
2002), 20.
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preface ix
arc of Shakespeare’s influence on Hecht’s poetry. Other ancestral
writers could have filled this role; Hecht was among the most deeply
allusive poets of his generation, and, consequently, many authors, ancient
as well as modern, make more than cameo appearances in my study.
But Shakespeare is his most frequent point of reference, even more so
than scripture—with allusion or echo often entailing resonances beyond
citation. Indeed, Don Paterson, in his New Commentary on Shakespeare’s
Sonnets, recalls an amusing incident in which Hecht is said to have
attributed his affectedly English accent—always surprising to a first-
time listener—to his having “read a great deal of Shakespeare as a
young man.”4 Hecht was a spell-binding, beautifully articulate reader
of poetry, it should be said, although I am hardly the only person to say
so, and Shakespeare, or rather Shakespeare as spoken on the stage in the
mid-twentieth century, served not simply as a model for utterance but
played into the shaping of individual poems themselves, indeed into
helping Hecht navigate a crucial junction in his mid-life shift toward
writing longer poems of a dramatic character as well as serving as a
point of departure for one of his great, sustained comic flights in “Love
for Four Voices” and the shorter, more intimate “Peripeteia,” certainly
among the finest love poems of its generation.
One of the benefits of reading published reviews of The Selected
Letters is hearing from others about their response to Hecht. On the
subject of Hecht and war, Colm Tóibín gets it just right. Quoting
Randall Jarrell’s remark in a review of Marianne Moore that “the real
war poets are always war poets, peace or any time,” Tóibín then applies
that observation to a more obvious candidate, Hecht.5 I take the point
to be not that war is the only topic for a war poet but that a war poet
can never be free of the subject, regardless of contemporary events.
Oblivion is not to be hired. And so it is with Hecht. I have tried to give
particular substance to this view by having his much anthologized
poem, “The Book of Yolek,” serve as a brief P.O.E. (point of embar-
kation) for this study. Only one other poem receives a single chapter,
4. Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary (London: Faber and Faber,
2010), 158–9. The anecdote is attached to Paterson’s reading of Sonnet 53, which also
spurred the observation that “Millions of Strange Shadows, incidentally, is one of Anthony
Hecht’s finest books” (158–9). For a slightly different account of the origins of his
accent see Hecht’s interview with J. D. McClatchy in the Paris Review, 108 (Fall, 1988),
163–4.
5. Tóibín, London Review of Books, 8 August 2013, 22.
