Anthony Hecht: a review essay
Who could have called their slow creation rage?
Hello to a large number of new subscribers over the weekend, as well as several new paid subscribers (many thanks!). I am delighted to discover that I’ve risen to the dizzy (albeit lowest) ranks of the “substack bestsellers”. For new readers: I publish a free essay every Thursday afternoon (CET). These are free for all for a month, but the archive is paywalled after four weeks. You can explore the full archive in the Table of Contents.
Fairly often, I publish an extra piece on a Monday. These are sometimes brief extra free pieces, and sometimes essays which are paywalled from the start — usually because they are paid-subscriber-only copies of essays or reviews originally published elsewhere. Today’s piece is a copy of a review essay on the American poet Anthony Hecht published earlier this year in the The Dark Horse, issue 48. The Dark Horse is one of the very best UK poetry magazines and this was a particularly bumper issue so do consider buying it.
If you are a free subscriber, you can always read the start of paywalled pieces, like today’s, for free, and you can also activate a “free trial” of a paid subscription if there’s one thing you particularly want to read.
Anthony Hecht, Collected Poems, edited by Philip Hoy (New York: Knopf, 2023) and Late Romance. Anthony Hecht – A Poet’s Life by David Yezzi (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2023).
What is the point of a biography? In Hecht’s case, I am really not sure. His war service was personally traumatic, but wholly undistinguished. He made a poor choice of first wife and wrote some unpleasant poems about it. But for the most part he was extremely fortunate at every turn: he came from considerable material comfort and was rarely if ever without it. After treating a few other women moderately badly, he luckily found an adoring and much younger second wife, predictably enough a former student. His apparently rather half-hearted teaching career was punctuated by a lavish series of prizes and fellowships, even before he had published his first collection, allowing him to spend generous periods abroad, usually in Italy, and culminating in a stint as US Poet Laureate. At one point his biographer, David Yezzi, remarks that his need for calm in which to work was “absolute, [. . .] even the disruption occasioned by a moderate teaching load was enough to prohibit any real productivity” (p. 210) and that as a result most of his writing took place during “vacations and fellowship years” (p. 246), which might lead certain readers to reflect that it’s all right for some.
I had no sense of Hecht’s life or personality before I read this autobiography, and on the whole I rather wish I hadn’t read it at all. He doesn’t come across as particularly likable or even – strangely – especially bright. Some people found him shy and gentle; others anxious, brittle and self-pitying. Yezzi resorts rather often to repetition and obvious ‘padding’: quoting a poem or letter at some length, for instance, after a long-ish contextual introduction, and then following it with a paraphrase. He courteously avoids pressing his subject – or his reader – on any of the potentially trickier points (‘some readers’, he ventures, ‘have perceived a sexist tone in the poem’ (p. 267) – a poem, that is, entitled ‘The Dover Bitch’ – but ‘this is a persona [.] and not the poet himself speaking’) and defers even judgement on the relative quality of the poems almost entirely to other voices: ‘The Venetian Vespers’, for example, ‘is widely thought of as Hecht’s masterwork’ (p. 333). (Does Yezzi agree? I didn’t.) He quotes fairly generously from the poems, but, beyond slotting them roughly sequentially into the events of Hecht’s life, has oddly little to say about them. Reading it felt like a decorous slog.
Hecht’s best poems are uniformly harrowing and free of any hint of redemption. I don’t think I can think of any other poet for whom this is so consistently true, except perhaps for Juvenal or parts (importantly, not all) of Job. There’s a prudish tendency in almost everything I’ve read about Hecht recently to elide the central qualities of his poetry – the anger, resentment and bitter irony that he often conveys so urgently – in favour of more sympathetic personal characteristics attributed to the man, rather than the work, such as anxiety, insecurity, or trauma. Accounting for Hecht’s considerable achievement in that way, it seems to me, does him a grave injustice, and opens him to a kind of ridicule or dismissal. (According to Yezzi, Hecht once described Sylvia Plath as “vain, malicious, envious and monstrously self-indulgent. Many people’s lives have been far more warped by misery than hers, and without their lapsing into such terrible self-pity” (p. 235). As my father would have said, it takes one to know one.)
But then, who cares, really, what Hecht was like? I agreed to write this piece because I knew that Hecht had written a handful of undeniably excellent poems. I looked forward to the excuse to read with sustained attention the entire Collected Poems of a poet I already knew a little, but not very well. The results were surprising. Surprising because Hecht, read in extenso, is a much more rebarbative and unusual poet than I had realised from the handful of translations and (sometimes abbreviated) anthology pieces I already knew well; and surprising, also, because the strength of his poetic personality and the particular shape and intensity of his negativity, as conveyed rather unforgettably in the poems, finds almost no echo in the paler, milder – and so much more tedious – portrait suggested by the biography. I don’t think I have read enough biographies of poets to know whether this is a lesson about the shortcomings or even futility of poetic biography in general, or just of this biography in particular.
