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Poets’ reputations often drop in critical stock and general popularity in the decade or two after their death. It takes an event—a biography, new scholarship, a collected or selected poems—to reverse the inertia. Since his death in 2004, Anthony Hecht has somewhat slipped off the poetry radar except among aficionados and connoisseurs. A new biography and a career-spanning Collected Poems are just the ticket for recentering him among the exceptionally strong generation of poets who came into their own in the years following the Second World War.

The barriers to Hecht’s broader popularity include the difficult surfaces of many of his poems, his elusive allusions, his fascination with high European culture (painting and music), his deep knowledge of biblical scripture, his use of a traditional prosody fallen out of fashion, and his penchant for extended dramatic monologues. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Hecht eschewed confessionalism, although many of his poems spring directly from his lonely childhood, his harrowing wartime experiences, and his marriages—one tumultuous and unhappy, and one blessedly stable. Two new volumes aim to rectify matters: Collected Poems (Knopf, 2023), meticulously edited by Philip Hoy, which includes previously uncollected poems and Hecht’s long out-of-print debut, and Late Romance (St. Martin’s Press, 2023), David Yezzi’s deeply researched and engagingly written biography.

As a reader, I want two things from a literary biography: an account of how the aspiring poet matures in achievement—including anecdotal insights and historical context for particular poems (pace New Critics)—and, let’s face it, juicy literary gossip. Yezzi’s biography delivers both in spades. Beyond this, though, and slightly outside the biographer’s usual remit, Yezzi aims to get us to like the man as well as admire the poet. This is potentially a tall order: some of Hecht’s more negative personality traits include brittle self-regard, sensitivity to slights (“Hecht was famously thin skinned,” according to the scholar Edward Mendelson), and the nursing of grudges. In person, he could be gallant and courtly, even funny, but he could also come across as aloof, sometimes affecting a mysterious English accent (he grew up in Manhattan and never spent significant time in the UK), and dressing with natty formality.

Late Romance focuses heavily on Hecht’s lonely yet privileged childhood. He grew up in “a handsomely appointed apartment building at 1327 Lexington Ave., which ran the length of an entire block.” He had little companionship and was tyrannized by a sadistic German governess who hit him with a toy rake. (The image of the German governess takes on more sinister overtones after Hecht’s WWII experiences, especially given his family’s Jewish German background.) The birth of his brother, Roger, who suffered from epilepsy and an assortment of other ailments, seems to have thrown Hecht into some outer darkness of his parents’ attentions. His father, a businessman, was financially improvident and attempted suicide on more than one occasion; his mother was distant and cold. (Hecht plausibly suggested she was a spy for the US War Department.) Hecht enjoyed a relatively happy time at summer camp—which provides the radical juxtaposition of summer camp and death camp in his powerful sestina “The Book of Yolek”—but he experienced the bitter taste of antisemitism as a middle schooler during his teacher’s discussion of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

Following Hecht’s lead, Yezzi portrays the trauma of the poet’s childhood as comparable to wartime experience. In “A Hill”—the first poem in Hecht’s groundbreaking second book, The Hard Hours (1967)—the speaker has a sort of PTSD episode during which, in the midst of a bright, noisy Italian marketplace, he is suddenly transported to a cold, bleak hillside. This could easily have been the site of some war skirmish, and rereading the poem after many years, that is what I half expected, and maybe even what the poem prepares me for:

I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,
But no other sign of life. And then I heard
What seemed the crack of a rifle

Instead, it is a falling branch. The poem concludes:

I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen.
All this happened about ten years ago,
And it hasn’t troubled me since, but at last, today,
I remembered that hill; it lies just to the left
Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy
I stood before it for hours in wintertime.

In its austerity and lack of ornament, the poem marks huge strides since Hecht’s first collection, A Summoning of Stones (1954). The horror of the hill inheres in its mystery, although it might be difficult for readers to be invested in whatever the hill means for the lonely child. (“My therapist had a lot of theories about that poem,” Hecht says elsewhere; we are not privy to them, however.)

One of Hecht’s deepest childhood wounds stemmed from his brother’s birth in 1926. Roger Hecht’s sickliness became the focus of their mother’s solicitude. Hecht’s resentment bordered on rage, even well into adulthood, and particularly because Roger often followed in his older brother’s footsteps, so far as to become an accomplished, albeit less successful, poet. One place Roger could not follow, because of his health, was into the army. Hecht then resented his brother's writing about the war and the Holocaust. The fierce envy (mixed with love, as Roger is the dedicatee of Hecht’s first book) is at times off-putting. Yet, this rivalry and the attendant guilt over it also led to one of Hecht’s late triumphs, “Cain the Inventor of Death,” which begins:

Gratefully I recall
Ignited globes of dew
The hilltop edged at dawn
With sunlight’s ormolu

Ormolu harkens back to the rococo vocabulary of early Hecht. The poem ends with bleak austerity, a plainspoken combination of tenderness and horror that marks the mature Hecht:

Later a brother came.
In rivalry we fought,
Or romped, tumbled and raced,
Wrestled and strove in sport.
 
And once I hit him hard,
Perhaps by some mistake,
Hit him so that he slept
And slept and didn’t wake.

Unsurprisingly, this appears to have been written only after Roger’s death in 1990.

Some of the anecdotes Yezzi collects in Late Romance were already available in Philip Hoy’s book-length interview with Hecht, published in 2005. There is, for instance, the story that when Hecht’s parents realized he planned to become a poet, they arranged an intervention with family friend Theodor Geisel, better known by his nom de plume Dr. Seuss. The avuncular Geisel asked Hecht what he wanted to be, and urged him to read the life of Joseph Pulitzer. (In the Hoy interview, Hecht dismissively refers to “Dr. Seuss, the cartoonist.”) Yezzi adds a follow-up story. When Hecht was in the army, his parents realized their cartoonist friend now worked for the Armed Forces Motion Picture Unit in Hollywood “producing instructional films under the eye of Frank Capra”(!). The Hechts seem to have suggested that their son might be transferred to that unit, safe from action; but transfers, as Yezzi notes, were “out of Geisel’s control.” Geisel offered that the war might prove an important life experience and would provide material for Hecht’s writing.

As irritating as such advice likely was coming from Geisel’s “comfy creative perch,” he was not wrong; World War II and the Holocaust became Hecht’s great subjects. Hecht joined the Army Specialized Training Program, which gave him the opportunity to focus on languages and translation, but when the program was suddenly dissolved, its cadets were “farmed out” as infantry replacements, i.e., cannon fodder. (According to historian Roger Spiller, “Of the millions of Americans sent overseas by the Army during World War II, only 14 percent were infantrymen. Those 14 percent took more than 70 percent of all the battle casualties among overseas troops.”) Hecht’s 97th Division was shipped off to Europe. Many men were wounded or lost in a quixotic attempt to “establish positions on the southern bank of the Sieg River.” In an unpublished account, Hecht writes:

Patrols were sent out every night from then on, some large and some small, but in every case, at least one man was hit. One night a thirty-man patrol returned with all but four men either wounded or dead. And the sum of all the information which these patrols were able to report was that the wall was cement, it was fifteen feet high, and the enemy was behind it.

For the rest of his life Hecht carried survivor’s guilt and, as Yezzi reveals, a secret shame that he never fired directly on the enemy. (Hecht’s division itself committed an atrocity: approached by a ragtag group of German women with small children waving white flags, they gunned them all down.)

Hecht’s division was among those that liberated the concentration camp of Flossenbürg: “The sheer number of the dead, the bodies and the stench, alerted the 97th to the presence of the camp,” Yezzi writes. Hecht, reasonably adept at speaking French and German, was given the job of interviewing survivors and gathering their testimony; for years he woke up screaming.

Late Romance is also good at chronicling the postwar period as Hecht mastered his art. Among the book’s pleasures are cameos by John Crowe Ransom, Sylvia Plath, W. H. Auden, Richard Wilbur, and Joseph Brodsky. Auden comes out especially well. In one of several important Italian sojourns, Hecht spent time in Ischia, an island in the Gulf of Naples where artists and writers lived cheaply, and where Auden was already ensconced. In Hecht’s description: “His clothing, even in the licensed atmosphere of the Italian beach resort, resembled, in his own words, ‘an unmade bed.’” If Hecht might have equated sartorial laxness with sloth, though, he was mistaken:

[Auden’s] work habits were fixed and inflexible, though set aside on Sundays. He rose around six in the morning and worked for a while before breakfast of coffee, and continued to work, with a brief interruption for a light lunch, until around three in the afternoon. The rest of the day was for diversion, dinner and drinks. But he had a fixed hour of retirement at, I think it was, 10:30, so he could be up and work at six the next morning.

John Crowe Ransom, founder and editor of the Kenyon Review, had a mischievous bent. The 24-year-old Hecht visited his office one day, ostensibly to discuss classroom business, but really to find out the fate of poems he had submitted. The men fell into an animated discussion of Shakespeare when Hecht suddenly noticed his own name on the chalkboard behind Ransom: the list of contributors to the next issue of the Review. No longer able to contain himself, Hecht asked if he was indeed slated for publication. Ransom turned around, pondered the list, and then erased the “H” of Hecht and chalked in “Br.”

As the pun of the title suggests, Late Romance is partly predicated on Hecht’s second marriage as the defining stroke of luck in his life, as well as on late Romanticism. The reader has some sympathy for Hecht’s first wife, the “world-class beauty” Patricia Harris. True, she ends up being wild and unfaithful; Hecht is almost certainly not the biological father of his second son, Adam. At the same time, she was probably a mere 19 or 20 years old when she first met Hecht, a decade her elder. (They met when she was babysitting for one of his other dates; he walked her home.) Understandably, she was baffled and bored by the longueurs of being left to her own devices as Hecht worked, and returned to modeling and partying.

The Hechts drank heavily and fought, in scenes reminiscent of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Hecht wanted Pat to get an abortion when she first became pregnant; however, a miscarriage stole the march and produced the guilt and regret out of which his fine poem “The Vow” springs:

In the third month, a sudden flow of blood.
The mirth of tabrets ceaseth, and the joy
Also of the harp. The frail image of God
Lay spilled and formless. Neither girl nor boy,
But yet blood of my blood

At Smith College, where Hecht was teaching, the couple coincided with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Plath described Pat in a journal as “pale, studiedly casual in torn sneakers & pleasant as razor-blades” and Hecht as “urbane, hair professionally curled & just barely tinct with grey.” Ted and Sylvia invited the Hechts to dinner, but the invitation was not reciprocated, which Plath took as a snub. Hecht later explained that Pat didn’t entertain because she was embarrassed about her cooking. Hecht described Plath as “vain, malicious, envious and monstrously self-indulgent,” and refused to grant her the trauma of childhood that he claimed for himself: “Many people’s lives have been far more warped by misery than hers, and without their lapsing into such terrible self-pity.”

The dissolution of Hecht’s first marriage in 1961 was a relief, although he was gutted by Pat’s removal of their sons to Europe, contravening their divorce decree. His devastating relationship with her (as well as with his approval-withholding mother) certainly explains, but does not exactly excuse, what strikes me as a bitter, arguably sexist streak in some of his poems about women: “The Man Who Married Magdalene,” “Death the Whore,” “The Witch of Endor,” “The Dover Bitch,” and “The Ghost in the Martini.” These are poems that have long niggled at me, including a translation that out-Horaces Horace in its disgust at an aging woman: “And the wind shrieks like a sex-starved thing in heat / As the moon goes dark and the mouth of your old dry vulva / Rages and hungers.” (There is nothing so anatomical as vulva in the Latin; Hecht might be onto something, though, in hitting upon the moon’s going dark as a menopausal image.)

I will add that, anecdotally, I know few women readers who find “The Dover Bitch” a wholly successful entertainment—the main joke, such as it is, being the title. Yezzi admits that, in 1963, Hecht’s reading of the poem at the 92nd Street Y “drew an uneasy response” from the audience and “some readers have perceived a sexist tone in the poem,” which concludes: “but there she is, / Running to fat, but dependable as they come. / And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’Amour.” Of course, the speaker is a persona (fair enough), and the poem is arguably a commentary on Matthew Arnold’s possibly patronizing attitude toward his anonymous addressee in “Dover Beach.” But then what to make of “The Ghost in the Martini,” an erudite and elegant monologue in 24 quatrains in which the speaker, an urbane, older poet, prone to speaking in literary quotations (perhaps in a posh English accent), debates with his conscience whether to bed a 20-year-old fan he meets at the bar? The tricky thing is that the persona seems to overlap uncomfortably with Hecht at his least appealing: “Moody and self-obsessed, . . . Full of ill-natured pride, an unconfessed / Snob.” As Yezzi puts it, the levity is “self-indicting.” It’s a technical tour de force that still gives me the creeps. Maybe that’s the point.

Yet the bitterness of Hecht’s years with Pat seems to have been largely healed by the eucatastrophe of his life: his meeting the woman who became his second wife, Helen D’Alessandro. She was his student some 13 years before at Smith College, and had evidently fallen in love with him then; later, they were reunited in a chance encounter. For the rest of Hecht’s days, Helen provided the love, unconditional support, tastefully-decorated home, intellectual companionship, expert cooking, and unruffled working environment that, well, every poet would ideally have!

Late Romance is rich in anecdote and characters (Chevy Chase has a walk-on as Hecht’s student), and gives many biographical insights into the poems, as, for instance, how Hecht’s response to Louis Simpson’s “The Man Who Married Magdalene,” in a poem of the same title, engages with Simpson’s not-so-veiled reference to Pat. Simpson also wrote Riverside Drive (1962), a novel in which the Hechts’ bumpy marriage features. Throughout his life, Hecht struggled with bouts of depression and writer’s block—perhaps two sides of the same affliction—but was often jolted back into creativity by cooperative projects with artists, especially with Leonard Baskin, whose images of crows inspired Ted Hughes.

Is a literary biography complete without backstabbing reviews, literary contretemps, and fallings out? A biography of Hecht is bound to oblige. When Hecht’s friend, the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, rejected a poem he had solicited (“See Naples and Die”), a long monologue which, according to Brodsky, didn’t “warrant the length it has been put to,” this led Hecht to “panic.” Even old friendships were susceptible to cancellation. One of Hecht’s longest friendships was with William L. MacDonald, the historian of Roman architecture. MacDonald casually informed Hecht there was a factual error in “The Cost,” a poem about Trajan’s Column. The poem concludes, of the Dacian Wars commemorated by the column, that its “fifteen-year campaign / Won seven years of peace.” In actuality, MacDonald remarked, the wars lasted only a couple of years. He had not offered this helpful correction when he read the poem before it went to print, on the basis that it was, after all, a poem, not history. The friends never reconciled.

There have been some apostasies of late regarding the whole concept of collected poems. In a recent issue of The Dark Horse, Kathryn Gray, writing about Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems, remarks, “As with other creators of significant output . . . the bringing together of all the work in one volume can seem, paradoxically, to undermine the overall achievement . . .. The cemetery is vast, the tending a Herculean task, and many a grave will be lost among the overgrown weeds.” Likewise, Christian Wiman has said in an interview: “I don’t really believe in collected poems. They’re almost always bad. The bad so far outweighs the good, I mean, that you’re left with a negative impression of even truly great poets like Frost or Stevens.” Hecht appears to be one of the few poets for whom a collected poems is not only beneficial, but necessary. He wrote and published sparingly. His first book, A Summoning of Stones, has long been difficult to access. Seeing it in the context of later work, or vice versa, is revelatory.

Hecht considered A Summoning of Stones the work of an “advanced apprentice.” He’s not wrong. The poems tend to be baroque and overwrought, such as “La Condition Botanique,” a poem whose “hothouse” aesthetic is appropriately situated in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. John Crowe Ransom is a strong, even overpowering influence, down to the word transmogrified, which appears in “Songs for the Air,” another poem from Stones. (As far as I’m concerned, transmogrify belongs only to Ransom and Calvin and Hobbes.) The standout poem from the debut, “Samuel Sewall,” channels Ransom uncannily in its wry anachronism:

But yet she bade him suffer a peruke,
“That One be not distinguished from the All”
Delivered of herself this stern rebuke
Framed in the resonant language of St. Paul.

Yet there are other poems, such as “Japan,” that have something of the mature Hecht in them, juxtaposing facile Asian stereotypes from the innocence of childhood with his war experiences and bringing his stupendous erudition to bear on moral questions. Images of acrobats and parasols from the “Home of the Short,” along with War Department warnings about Eastern deviousness, are contrasted with a reality of humble courtesy, poverty, and suffering. Schistosomiasis—a parasitic disease that resulted from fertilizing rice patties with human excrement—takes up a whole line of the poem’s real estate.

This new Collected is for the completist. It includes the aforementioned poems, as well as 17 uncollected poems. Also welcome are Hoy’s illuminating notes (it seems unlikely I would have ever fully got the pun on Simeon Pyrites without them), which build on J.D. McClatchy’s notes in the previous Selected Poems (2011). Hoy also has “silently corrected” a few typos. I’m relieved that the nonsensical Greek of “amphybrachs” in Hecht’s otherwise delightful take on Horace, “Application for a Grant,” an orthographic slip which had survived into the Colleted Earlier Poems, has been here set to rights.

Collected Poems also illustrates how completely The Hard Hours jumped to Hecht’s mature style: pared down, severe, and moving by juxtaposition. That volume contains three of his greatest poems, “The Vow,” “More Light! More Light!” and “It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It,” which ends, in spare nursery-rhyme trimeters:

Yet by quite other laws
My children make their case;
Half God, half Santa Claus,
But with my voice and face,
 
A hero comes to save
The poorman, beggarman, thief,
And make the world behave
And put an end to grief.
 
And that their sleep be sound
I say this childermas
Who could not, at one time,
Have saved them from the gas.

These poems, and a half-dozen others I would label “great,” should ensure Hecht’s place in future anthologies and in the postwar American pantheon—no mean feat considering that august generation included, among others, John Ashbery, Gwendolyn Brooks, Donald Justice, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, and Adrienne Rich. Yezzi’s biography and the Collected prepare the way for a fuller critical reappraisal, and for a new admiring readership. The only thing that remains to be compiled, I think, is a volume of collected translations. The translations included here are tantalizingly good, and there are others (such as Hecht and Helen H. Bacon’s translation of Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes), still waiting to be collected.

I've written elsewhere about Hecht’s fine translations of Horace, which are what attracted me to Hecht in the first place. As poets, they have a surprising amount in common: firsthand experience of war, immense erudition, formal grace, and a famous late return to lyric and “romance.” Would Hecht say along with Horace, “I have constructed a monument more lasting than bronze”? At his most brash and confident I think he would. Certainly, with this Collected, he could be confident in uttering “non omnis moriar”: I shall not altogether perish.