Anthony Evan Hecht
(January 16, 1923 – October 20, 2004)
Anthony Hecht remarked about his time as an infantryman in Germany and as an interpreter at Flossenbürg, a concentration camp, “The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after, I would wake shrieking.” There was little he could write in his letter to his family back home, due not in part to censorship during those years but rather for the reason of an inability to describe what he was truly experiencing. He stated, “‘I can’t think of anything to write about that isn’t horrible.’ and so his letters to home did not reflect his experiences and journey with the 97th Infantry Division.
The war haunted him. His poetry was written as a way of responding to those harrowing years in France, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. He would go on to write many powerful war poems, “‘More Light! More Light!,’” “Rites and Ceremonies,” “Still Life,” and “The Book of Yolek,”.
Anthony Hecht was a gifted and distinguished poet of the past half-century. Born in 1923, died in 2004. He saw a great deal of heavy combat during his war years of 1944-1945. It was the Flossenberg concentration camp that affected him the most and he would revisit the themes about the horrors of war and the Holocaust in his work.
He spoke of his early childhood during an interview, “I was encouraged to be mediocre. When I was quite young, I developed a fierce interest in music and started to teach myself the piano; my mother then lost all interest in music, and quit playing. When my brother and I started to write poetry, she stopped reading poetry abruptly, and firmly declared she “couldn’t understand” anything written by either of us. At one point my parents exhibited such despondency and doubt about my ability to do anything whatsoever that they spent a large sum of money to have me tested at the Pratt Institute. The test took several days, and I hated it because it was just one more ordeal of scrutiny and evaluation that was likely to humiliate me. Finally it was over, and then the results came in. I was told nothing, and was tormented between a desire to know and a fear of knowing. At last, aware that a lot of money had been invested in this test, I forced myself to ask my mother about it, and was told in a tone of mild regret and resignation that the aptitude tests indicated that I had no aptitudes whatever. As the evidence continued to pile up on all sides it became increasingly difficult to attain any confidence in myself; and I wanted alternately to be dead or to be “old,” which meant to me, in either case, no longer under the scrutiny of authorities I was powerless to combat. So the “sadness” you speak of in the poems is the matured and mellowed residue of what in childhood had been a poisonous brew of fear, hatred, self-loathing, impotence, and deep discouragement.”
He showed little academic ability in school. After discovering the works of Dylan Thomas, TS Eliot and Auden he decided to become a poet but his parents wished to dissuade him. He loved the works of Auden. He and his brother Roger would both become gifted poets. Poetry became the vehicle to carry him away from the stark years of having to interview the survivors of the Nazi concentration camp. Those experiences led him to have a postwar bout of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Literature for him were as he called them, “talismans of a sort; they symbolized sanity and joy; they were the lovely inventions of admirable minds, and they were moreover meant to remind me of the happy place where I first encountered them.” They were to be realms of coherence and happiness for him but he stated books at that time failed him completely. “they had that day all the vitality and impact of a random page of the Oswego telephone directory. I read and reread, with mounting terror, those lyrics and speeches that had enthralled me only a month before—and it was as if I had been lobotomized. My mind was gone, or completely numbed. I tried twice during the following weeks, with the same heartbreaking results. I put the books away, and never looked at them again during the entire time I spent in the army.”
After the war, he worked as a staff writer for the Stars and Stripes, during his last 6 months in the Army. He used his GI Bill to study and would later receive a Masters from Columbia University.
He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for his memoirs, The Hard Hours. The poem “More Light! More Light!” opens with the burning of a Christian heretic in the Tower of London and ends sadly and horrifically. Hecht’s war experiences and poetry would bring him much success but both would make him suffer as well. Finally, after addressing his WWII experiences in The Hard Hours, Hecht would have nervous-breakdown.
Hecht would recover and go on to teach and write more about poetry, and win much praise for his works. He died October 20th, 2004 and is buried at Bard College.
A Friend Killed in the War
Night, the fat serpent, slipped among the plants,
Intent upon the apples of his eyes;
A heavy bandoleer hung like a prize
Around his neck, and tropical red ants
Mounted his body, and he heard advance,
Little by little, the thin female cries
Of mortar shells. He thought of Paradise.
Such is the vision that extremity grants.
In the clean brightness of magnesium
Flares, there were seven angels by a tree.
Their hair flashed diamonds, and they made him doubt
They were not really from Elysium.
And his flesh opened like a peony,
Red at the heart, white petals furling out.
“More Light! More Light!”
Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.”
Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.
And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul’s tranquillity.
We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.
Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Lüger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.
Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and to get back in.
No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Lüger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.
No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.
The Book of Yolek
Wir Haben ein Gesetz,
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben.*
The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail. It doesn’t matter where to,
Just so you’re weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hills have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories of declining day.
You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home:
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.
The fifth of August, 1942.
It was the morning and very hot. It was the day
They came at dawn with rifles to The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.
How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven to,
And about the children, and how they were made to walk,
Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn’t a day
Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.
We’re approaching August again. It will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They all were forced to take that terrible walk.
Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.
Prepare to receive him in your home some day.
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you’re sitting down to a meal.
* We have a law, and according to the law he must die.
The Venetian Vespers (Part IV)
But I find peace
In the arcaded dark of the piazza
When a thunderstorm comes up. I watch the sky
Cloud into tarnished zinc, to Quaker gray
Drabness, its shrouded vaults, fog-bound crevasses
Blinking with huddled lightning, and await
The vast son et lumière. The city’s lamps
Faintly ignite in the gathered winter gloom.
The rumbled thunder starts – an avalanche
Rolling down polished corridors of sound,
Rickety tumbrels blundering across
A stone and empty cellarage. And then,
Like a whisper of dry leaves, the rain begins.
It stains the paving stones, forms a light mist
Of brilliant crystals dulled with tones of lead
Three inches off the ground. Blown shawls of rain
Quiver and luff, veil the cathedral front
In flailing laces while the street lamps hold
Fixed globes of sparkled haze high in the air
And the black pavement runs with wrinkled gold
In pools and wet dispersions, fiery spills
Of liquid copper, of squirming, molten brass.
To give one’s whole attention to such a sight
Is a sort of blessedness. No room is left
For antecedence, inference, nuance.
One escapes from all the anguish of this world
Into the refuge of the present tense.
The past is mercifully dissolved, and in
Easy obedience to the gospel’s word,
One takes no thought whatever of tomorrow,
The soul being drenched in fine particulars.
Obituary from TIMES ONLINE, October 26, 2004: Poet who expressed the horrors of the 20th century in verse of formal rigor and cultured gravity.
“One wants to feel in control,” Anthony Hecht once said of the formal, austere poetry that became his hallmark. “If you are writing in free verse, what makes it a poem? A number of my contemporaries wrote in free verse, but it became just random jottings from their minds.”
Hecht’s own poetry was the opposite of random: most of his verse appeared so highly crafted and formally rigorous as to be unimprovable. Among the finest American poets of the late 20th century, he was the creator of an urbane body of work that emphasized formal integrity and classical austerity when many were as consciously eschewing them.
Anthony Evan Hecht was born in New York City in 1923, the son of a banker. He was educated at three of the city’s schools before studying at Bard College, a progressive offshoot of Columbia University that emphasized self-directed study, particularly in the fine and liberal arts.
Almost as soon as he got there Hecht decided that he wanted to become a poet. He announced his new vocation to his horrified parents who at once enlisted a family friend, Theodore Geisel, to dissuade him.
Geisel, better known as the children’s author Dr Seuss, advised Hecht to read the biography of Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper publisher. Surmising that he was being pushed towards more lucrative ways than poetry of writing for money, Hecht never read the book. Later in life, he joked that his main piece of advice to young writers was never to read the biography of Joseph Pulitzer: but perhaps appropriately, he took the Pulitzer Prize for poetry anyway in 1968.
After three years at Bard College, Hecht was drafted into the 97th Infantry Division of the US Army after the outbreak of the Second World War. As basic training proceeded, he said, he found himself entirely unable to read. “The combination of fatigue and the numbing effect of close-order drill . . . had all but lobotomized me,” he told the writer Philip Hoy. “I feared I would never be able to read anything with pleasure again, should I even survive. It was a terrifying kind of pre-death.”
Pre-death became actual once Hecht’s division was sent to Europe. “There is much about this I have never spoken of, and never will,” Hecht later said of his war service. He served in France, Czechoslovakia and Germany, often under heavy fire and inept command. He saw men of his company machinegun German women and children who were waving white flags, something that he said “left me without the least vestige of patriotism or national pride”. His division was also the first to discover the concentration camp at Flossenbürg. Hecht, who spoke some French and German, translated the statements of the prisoners who could still speak. “The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension,” he said. “For years after I would wake screaming.”
On leaving Germany, he spent some time in Japan, generating news copy to portray the occupying American forces in a favorable manner. “It was quite shameless, hypocritical work,” he said, “and therefore perfectly consistent with everything I had ever known about the Army.”
Discharged in 1946, he studied for a further year at Kenyon College in Ohio. There, he was taught by John Crowe Ransom, whose poetry he came fervently to admire. At the end of the year he went briefly to Iowa to teach, but, suffering from post-traumatic shock syndrome after his war service, gave it up swiftly to enter psychoanalysis. After that he returned to New York, where he was taught by Allen Tate; and when Tate left, Hecht took over his teaching job.
In 1951 he was awarded a Prix de Rome fellowship — beating Jack Kerouac — and spent a year writing in Rome. While in Italy, he visited Auden on Ischia and spent an afternoon helping him to pick the Yale Younger Poet of the Year — John Ashbery.
Hecht’s first collection, A Summoning of Stones, appeared in 1954, when he was 31. It was impressive and well reviewed, but seen now it appears to falter under a counterfeit archaism and wilful elegance that Hecht later eliminated. Nevertheless, it won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, enabling him to quit Bard College and return to Rome. That year, he also married.
By the time his next collection appeared in 1968, his marriage was over and Hecht had gone from teaching job to teaching job, backed by a string of fellowships. He continued to innovate — in 1966 Esquire magazine published an essay in which he and John Hollander introduced a form of light verse composed of double dactyls, featuring the exploits of Marcus Aurelius, Vladimir Horowitz, Judas Iscariot and other rhythmically felicitous personalities — but it was with the publication of The Hard Hours that his reputation became international. He won the Pulitzer Prize the next year.
Gone was the effortful sprezzatura of his earlier volume. In its place was an individual voice — formal, grave and bleak, but not without humor — in which Hecht was able to tackle subjects from the Holocaust (in the much-anthologized More Light! More Light!) to Matthew Arnold (the entertaining parody The Dover Bitch). It was an urbane poetry that did not flinch from atrocity and horror, employing well-mannered classical reticence to set off the inhumanity of its subjects.
Such a style would become Hecht’s stock in trade. He pursued it in Millions of Strange Shadows (1977) and in The Venetian Vespers two years later, which, in language laced with Psalmic references, explored the inner landscape of an expat American wandering in Venice: “an obsolete/ Left over from a weak ancien régime/ About to be edged out with upstart germs”.
After Obbligati in 1986 he became almost prolific, turning out collections in 1990 (The Transparent Man), 1993 (The Hidden Law), 1996 (Flight among the Tombs) and 2002 (The Darkness and the Light). He also taught younger writers such as Brad Leithauser and Norman Williams, and served on the faculties of Harvard, Yale and Rochester College. He retired in 1993.
Hecht’s criticism displayed the sensitivity to musical and rhythmic life that informed all his poems. He set himself to study what he called “the music of forms”, believing that poetry “works upon us in ways of which we are not fully aware unless we put ourselves to study of the work . . . and examine it with care, tact and delicacy.”
Those three principles were central to his own analyses; but he was an astute forger of linkages, too. Once he suggested that the sonnet form might owe its persistence to the Vitruvian ideal of architectural proportion, noting that the relationship between the length and width of Palladio’s Villa Foscari is 8:6, the same as that between the octet and the sestet in a Petrarchan sonnet.
Hecht’s final book, The Darkness and the Light, was notable for its further condensation of what was already a compressed poetic form. One poem, Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-Seven, has as its final stanza:
A turn, a glide, a quarter-turn and bow,
The stately dance advances; these are airs
Bone-deep and numbing as I should know by now,
Diminishing the cast, like musical chairs.
His wife and son survive him, as well as two sons from his first marriage.
Poetry
A Summoning of Stones (1954)
The Hard Hours (1967)
Millions of Strange Shadows (1977)
The Venetian Vespers (1979)
The Transparent Man (1990)
Flight Among the Tombs (1998)
The Darkness and the Light (2001)
picture from poetryfoundation.org