Anthony Hecht is, without question, the best poet writing in English today,” Joseph Brodsky declared in 1984, despite what he called his own “foreigner’s natural prudence with epithets.” Brodsky’s full-throated encomium attests to more than collegial good feeling (though the two were friends from Hecht’s teaching days at Harvard in the early 1970s). In Hecht’s exquisite and tenebrous poems, Brodsky discerned the presence of the tragic muse, operating in much the way she had on Brodsky himself—through history. Few American poets qualify as children of history in the way that a Russian of Brodsky’s generation would have understood, and even fewer children of history become poets. True, Hecht was fortunate never to endure political persecution and exile (or worse); nevertheless, the events of his life do amply—and, in some instances, horribly—fulfill the putative Chinese curse about living in interesting times.

Born to upper-middle-class, secular Jewish parents in New York City, Hecht (1923–2004) was keenly aware as a boy of the bitter effects of the Depression. While never “seriously in want” (Hecht’s phrase), his anxiety about his own family’s difficulties was amplified by the shocks he encountered around the city, including the covered bodies of suicides laid out on the sidewalk. His stockbroker father made ruinous investments, repeatedly losing “his shirt (and the frock coats of others),” as Hecht told Philip Hoy in 1998.

His father’s subsequent suicide attempts and his mother’s rages at having to ask her family for yet another bailout combined to sour the atmosphere of Hecht’s childhood home. A number of other factors contributed to what Hecht came to see as his unhappy childhood, among them his brother’s epilepsy, his parents’ perennial dissatisfaction with him, and his own natural melancholia. Or, as he writes in “Apprehensions,” from Millions of Strange Shadows (1967), now in Selected Poems:

A grave and secret malady of my brother’s,
The stock exchange, various grown-up shames,
The white emergency of hospitals,
Inquiries from the press, such coups de théâtre
Upon a stage from which I was excluded
Under the rubric of “benign neglect”
Had left me pretty much to my own devices
(My own stage was about seven years old)
Except for a Teutonic governess
Replete with the curious thumb-print of her race,
That special relish for inflicted pain. [1]

Hecht’s lackluster elementary and high-school career—at Dalton, Collegiate, and Horace Mann in Riverdale—landed him at the “experimental” Bard College, where he first fell in love with poetry. But his college years, the happiest of his life up to that point, were curtailed by the Second World War. Hecht’s experiences as an infantryman—both in combat and at the liberation of Flossenbürg in Bavaria—haunted him for the rest if his life. And haunted is surely the mot juste. Christopher Ricks enumerates, in his Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities recently published by Yale, many of the ghostly presences, both personal and historical, that inhabit Hecht’s poems from the beginning.[2] Occasionally, these chthonic voices strike a wry and lively note, as in “The Ghost in the Martini,” where the poet’s concupiscence is chastised by a voice emanating from a lemon twist. More often, they are bleak and tormented, like the specter of the forsaken woman reproving her forgetful lover in “Death the Whore.”

Another unhappy chapter of Hecht’s life followed his divorce in 1961 from his first wife, who quickly remarried and moved with their two sons to Belgium. This separation from his children caused a severe bout of depression for which Hecht was hospitalized. (He had previously suffered a “nervous breakdown” just after the war, which caused him to return to New York and enter psychoanalysis.) At Gracie Square Hospital, he was treated with Thorazine but avoided the shock therapy that other poets of his generation—such as Plath, whom he knew—underwent.

So fully does Hecht’s life resonate with the brutal events of the last century that it now may be seen as emblematic, his poems a lens on what Auden called the Age of Anxiety, a fever chart of its atrocities and sustaining graces. (It should be added that caustic hilarity and even full-throated joy are also essential, if less frequent, notes in Hecht’s oeuvre.)

Hecht’s identity in his poetry is, as Adam Kirsch has said of Brodsky, “universalist and cosmopolitan,” composed of echoes from Shakespeare and the Bible, the Greeks, European painting (both Old Master and modern), and Classical music. “The story of the orphaned Jew who is reborn as the child of civilization is one of the great and ambiguous legends of modernity,” writes Kirsch, “and all such stories include a scene where the child is forcibly reminded that civilization doesn’t always trump history.” For Brodsky, that moment occurred the year before he met Hecht for the first time, in 1972, when Brodsky was among the 32,000 Jews to leave Russia, a token gesture prior to Nixon’s visit to Moscow. For Hecht, that reminder came during the war.

Hecht’s disillusionment, begun in the chilly solitudes of childhood, became all-encompassing during his Army service. Immersed in French and German languages in the Army Specialized Training Program, ostensibly a fast-track to cushy service, he was in the event assigned to the 97th Infantry. Rising no higher than Private, First Class, he was deployed with C Company to France, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. Hecht admitted to Hoy that there was much about the war he never spoke of, and never would. This is particularly striking given the horrors Hecht did describe, including this incident following a firefight with German soldiers. After an extended bout of shooting, during which Hecht’s company was pinned down, a pause:

And then, to my astonishment, a small group of German women, perhaps five or six, leading small children by the hand, and with white flags of surrender fixed to staves and broom-handles, came up over the far crest and started walking slowly toward us, waving their white flags back and forth. They came slowly, the children retarding their advance. They had to descend the small incline that lay between their height and ours. When they were about half way, and about to climb the slope leading to our position, two of our machine guns opened up and slaughtered the whole group.

But this was not the worst. Hecht goes on to tell Hoy, with characteristic understatement, about what was for him the greatest trauma of the war—the liberation of Flossenbürg, an annex of Buchenwald:

It was both an extermination camp and a slave-labor camp, where prisoners were made to manufacture Messerschmitts at a factory right within the perimeter of the camp. When we arrived, the SS personnel had, of course, fled. Prisoners were dying at a rate of 500 a day from typhus. Since I had the rudiments of French and German, I was appointed to interview such French prisoners as were well enough to speak, in the hope of securing evidence against those who ran the camp. Later, when some of these were captured, I presented them with the charges leveled against them, translating their denials or defenses back into French for the sake of their accusers, in an attempt to get to the bottom of what was done and who was responsible. The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking.

The survivors were naked, skeletal, their yellowed skin stretched over bony frames. As one soldier from Hecht’s company reported: “Many had died with their eyes wide open staring into space as if they were seeing over and over again all the torture the Germans had put them through—their mouths open, gasping for that last breath that might keep them alive.” When a prisoner died, one of his fellows would carry his body to the stack of bodies beside the incinerator. The smell, he added, was unimaginable.

Hecht’s experience of Judaism—a source of childhood unease due to the genteel anti-Semitism of the day—changed significantly after the war. “In time I came to feel an awed reverence for what the Jews of Europe had undergone, a sense of marvel at the hideousness of what they had been forced to endure. I came to feel that it was important to be worthy of their sacrifices, to justify my survival in the face of their misery and extinction, and slowly I began to shed my shame at being Jewish.” The tension in Hecht between justice and injustice, hope and hopelessness (which like honor and dishonor, beauty and horror, are frequently paired or juxtaposed in his work), takes on a nightmarish cast in “Persistences,” a rare statement of the poet’s memorializing “task”:

Who comes here seeking justice,
    Or in its high despite,
Bent on some hopeless interview
    On wrongs nothing can right?

Those throngs disdain to answer,
    Though numberless as flakes;
Mine is the task to find out words
    For their memorial sakes

Who press in dense approaches,
    Blue numeral tattoos
Writ crosswise on their arteries,
   The burning, voiceless Jews.

A number of his greatest poems—“Rites and Ceremonies,” “‘More Light! More Light!,’” “‘It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It,’” “The Book of Yolek”—come out of the war, yet Hecht is not in the end primarily a war poet. Still, there is a sense in which the war is always present. As J. D. McClatchy puts it in his percipient introduction to Selected Poems, “scenes described from Hecht’s childhood, where we find a lonely boy staring blankly out of the window, or standing paralyzed in front of a hill in winter,” mingle with austerities derived from his wartime experience, such that those “wartime memories—of sickening fear or helplessness—serve to focus earlier, deeper memories, and the way they each recall and reinforce the other is part of the force of a Hecht poem.” For Hecht, the war was the original sin that suffused all subsequent (and recalled) experience with a dry-eyed and terrible melancholy.

An imaginary map of Hecht’s sensibility, McClatchy points out, “would most certainly note how, as it were, Germany and Italy border each other. His experiences as a combatant in World War II and later as a sojourner in Italy were central for Hecht as landscapes over which deeper issues were deployed.” His poems insistently patrol the imaginary boarders of European culture—between civilization and barbarism, between sublimity and atrocity, between the meliorating power of art and its failure in the face of evil. Edward Hirsch, in his essay “Comedy and Hardship,” further characterizes the dual nature of Hecht’s aesthetic, noting that, for Hecht, “The hero who needs to maintain purity can’t in fact live in the world as it is. He wants a simpler and cleaner place. The survivor, on the other hand, learns to accept the cold self-mocking compromises of reality.” The impossibility of the hero in the eyes of the survivor becomes a recurring theme in Hecht’s work.

Hecht conveys such bitter realizations without bitterness, painstakingly discovering how the tenets of civilization—art, religion, culture—also contain their opposites (not unlike what he calls elsewhere the “corrupted treasures of this world”). Hecht can illustrate the disparity with a single image or phrase, as in “Gott mit uns” (“God with us,” literally, Emmanuel), engraved on the belt buckles of Wehrmacht soldiers, or the Iron Cross, at once sacred and profane—“The sign of the child, the grave, worship and loss.”

Alicia Ostriker gets at this Hechtian paradox as follows: “At its most energetic and disturbing . . . Hecht’s art registers a Hellenic delight in beauty and order undermined by the Hebraic conviction that the beauty and order of high culture have been founded on suffering and cruelty.” That the bucolic wood alluded to by Goethe in a poem of 1780 (“The little birds fall silent in the woods”) later becomes the location of Buchenwald is an irony not lost on Hecht; neither is the “Sturm-Abteilungs Kommandant/ Who loves Beethoven and collects Degas.”

A similar revelation, or lifting of the curtain, occurs in Hecht’s early masterpiece “A Hill,” in which the bustle of an Italian market at midday gives way, in an ominous and unexplained reverie, to a boyhood scene of desolation. The daydream or vision that intrudes on the Italian piazza resonates in tone and imagery—the cold, the gray, the gun shot—with scenes of the war:

And even the great Farnese Palace itself
Was gone, for all its marble; in its place
Was a hill mole-colored and bare. It was very cold,
Close to freezing, with a promise of snow.
The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap
Outside a factory wall. There was no wind,
And the only sound for a while was the little click
Office as it broke in the mud under my feet.
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.

Nothing is purely itself/ But is linked with its antidote/ In cold self-mockery—,” Hecht writes in “Three Prompters from the Wings,” singling out in particular “triumph and chagrin,” “wisdom and ignorance,” “happiness and pain.” Hecht represents this two-sided coin in “The Deodand,” which begins with the description of women in a painting by Renoir who are costuming themselves in Arab garb. “What are these women up to?,” the poem asks. “They’ve gone and strung/ Drapes over the windows, cutting out the light/ And the slightest hope of a breeze here in mid-August.” In the dim light, Hecht depicts a scene of ornate beauty:

Gauzy organzas with metallic threads,
Intricate Arab vests, brass ornaments
At wrist and ankle, those small sexual fetters,
Tight little silver chains, and bangled gold
Suspended like a coarse barbarian treasure
From soft earlobes pierced through symbolically,
They are preparing a tableau vivant.
One girl, consulting the authority
Of a painting, perhaps by Ingres or Delacroix,
Is reporting over her shoulder on the use
Of kohl to lend its dark, savage allurements.

But, in Hecht’s world, such playacting is never purely innocent sport. (“The coltish horseplay of the locker room” transforms, in “The Feast of Stephen,” to a scene of brilliantly oiled bodies at a stoning.) History is always looming and posing pointed questions:

Have they no intimation, no recall
Of the once queen who liked to play at milkmaid,
And the fierce butcher-reckoning that followed
Her innocent, unthinkable masquerade?

The ironic use of “innocent” sets the tone of the poem. The unthinking masquerade of the harem girls becomes the unthinkable masquerade of Marie Antoinette. Then the poem itself veers from reasoned argument to irrational cruelty. The shift is made without transition or comment; it is an identity, as fierce and strange as metaphor—

      In the final months of the Algerian war
They captured a very young French Legionnaire.
They shaved his head, decked him in a blond wig,
Carmined his lips grotesquely, fitted him out
With long, theatrical false eyelashes
And a bright, loose-fitting skirt of calico,
And cut off all the fingers of both hands.
He had to eat from a fork held by his captors.
Thus costumed, he was taken from town to town,
Encampment to encampment, on a leash,
And forced to beg for his food with a special verse
Sung to a popular show tune of those days:
“Donnez moi à manger de vos mains
Car c’est pour vous que je fais ma petite danse;
Car je suis Madelaine, la putain,
Et je m’en vais le lendemain matin,
Car je suis La Belle France.”[3]

Hecht works out a similar juxtaposition in what is perhaps his most well-known poem, “More Light! More Light!,” which twists Goethe’s final words into the repeated phrase “no light.” The poem begins with an unnamed Renaissance martyr burned at the stake. As described, the death is brutal but courageous and not without dignity. Then: “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.” When the Pole refuses, the Jews willingly bury him, until they are commanded to dig him out again. In the end, the Pole buries the two Jews alive and is shot to death in reward. There is no honorable death in the heroic sense, only victims.

Hecht, along with James Merrill, Richard Howard, Richard Wilbur, and McClatchy, is pre-eminent among what Merrill once jokingly referred to as the “great fancies.” Mandarin and high-toned, at a distinct remove from everyday speech, Hecht’s poems are always having to be defended, in this age of free-verse ditch-water diction, against those who would dismiss the hieratic as out of register with the way people live and talk. In fact, Hecht’s use of high and low is deliberate and masterly. There is a great tonal range in his work between what Ted Hughes identified as “fastidious and elegant” and an “absolute raw simplicity and directness” (about which territory Hughes himself was a seasoned guide).

“The dramaturgy of culture versus barbarism is a familiar one,” writes Kirsch in The Modern Element. “What makes it unusual in Hecht’s poetry is that, at the same time that he reflects on the shattering of humanism, his own language pays homage to it.” But perhaps here is no real contradiction. Hecht’s great achievement was to discover a “semantic” style, one in which the refinements of culture and beauty are continually being undermined by the squalid truths of history communicated through his diction and subjects—an affecting disconnect between the high music of his verse and the seemingly endless parade of human failing it describes.

Hecht’s second act—his long and distinguished teaching career, his happy second marriage, the Poet Laureateship, and the Pulitzer Prize—was far rosier. He acknowledges his good fortune in a number of his poems, perhaps most notably “Peripeteia,” in which Miranda steps from the stage and leads him out by the hand. The event is a kind of miracle and more real “than any dream/ Shakespeare or I or anyone ever dreamed.” It is a true Shakespearean ending: after witnessing so much that was unspeakable, and weighing for so long the sins of men, the happiness of Hecht’s later life is as heartening as it is unlikely. To Hecht’s credit, he seems not to have gainsaid or ironized this blessed peripety, only to have humbly acknowledged it and memorialized it in poetry.