Like his near-contemporary, the late Philip Larkin, Anthony Hecht has produced, since the ripening of his talent in the early Fifties, one slender volume of poems per decade: A Summoning of Stones (1954), The Hard Hours (1967), Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), and The Venetian Vespers (1979). (The Venetian Vespers turned out to be Hecht’s book for the Eighties.) All the work from these books has been gathered in a moderately sized Collected Earlier Poems—moderately sized, that is, for a poet who is now in his seventh decade. This book is accompanied by a separate collection of new work entitled The Transparent Man. Judging by the rate at which Hecht has been publishing, The Transparent Man is likely to be Hecht’s book for the Nineties.

Again like Larkin, Hecht is a meticulous writer, laboring arduously on his poems, and unusually patient when it comes to publication. But there the resemblance between the two poets more or less ends. Hecht has long been viewed as the unabashed champion of high art, writing verse in an elevated, at times archaic, language: “A little snuffbox whereon Daphnis sings, / In pale enamels, touching love’s defeat.” Hecht also relies on wordplay (“Whirled without end,” “Our name in lights, somewhat the worse for where,” etc.) and on settings and subject matter—foreign lands, works of art, the mythical past—that demand a certain level of knowledge and sophistication from the reader. In all of this, of course, Hecht differs vastly from Larkin, whose poetic province