Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.
—Pascal

Some poets cavil at the notion of a “collected poems” in their lifetime. While I can’t quite imagine it, I think I see their point. There’s something peremptory about a collected, like cashing in one’s chips and leaving the game. And who would feel that he had written enough? Edgar Bowers, pleased by the handsome edition of his poems in one volume, said he only wished that it were longer—not unlike life itself, I want to add. A collected poems lays bare an entire career. And was it worth it, the many years spent jotting? A collected contains all that’s needed for readers—and even for the poet himself—to answer yes or no.

Anthony Hecht’s recent Collected Later Poems takes up where his magnificent Collected Earlier Poems leaves off. The two books span some fifty years of writing, from A Summoning of Stones in 1954 to roughly the present. Hecht, of course, is still very much with us and adding to his complete works, but, regardless of any poems that follow, these two volumes constitute one of the great achievements in poetry of the last hundred years.

This will be even clearer, I suspect, in decades to follow, which is not to say that Hecht has suffered neglect. He is one of our most laureled poets. But the way that critics celebrate Hecht often strikes me as both backhanded and wholly typical of the current climate in American poetry. “An accomplished formalist” recurs as the standard tag, the phrase meant as qualified praise, like complimenting someone’s calligraphy —very pretty, no doubt, and once valued, perhaps, but rather too precious for anything today beyond addressing wedding invitations. Elegant but irrelevant.

The ineptitude of this kind of grudging appreciation is not the worst of it. One pities those who feel that a given age can accommodate only one kind of poetry (free verse these days, presumably), as if important work by both Eliot and Hardy, for example, did not issue from the 1920s, or from Larkin and Bunting in the 1960s, or from Geoffrey Hill in both free and metered verse throughout his career. No, the real downside to the appellation “formalist,” more damning than the taint of fustiness, is the way it precludes poems from being anything other than formal. A good formalist, the epithet suggests, is one who produces exquisite verse, period.

No one, I think, disputes Hecht’s command of English verse, but, because prosodic skill is a rare and useless talent in this free-verse age, his work sometimes arouses the same admiration lavished on a bipedal poodle. Labeling Hecht a formalist, while undeniable in the most obvious sense, misses the point. If anyone puts paid to the notion that metrical skill cancels passion, it’s Hecht. What’s more, if form and subject matter may be seen as complementary and interdependent, the opposite point better characterizes his work: Hecht may be the foremost “matterist” of his age, a feat more brilliant and difficult, in the end, than the mastery of traditional forms that he so abundantly displays.

The Later Poems provides an occasion to survey Hecht’s matter in toto, by which I mean something more than the sum of his lucidly limned subjects: a marriage dissolving, a painter en plein air, an orchestra tuning, sounds echoing in a cathedral. Nor do I mean those Hechtian signatures that crop up in poem after poem, such as the meliorating power (woefully limited) of art, music, and culture; Talmudic confrontations with biblical writing; Jamesian dramas of dissolution and death; savage satires. If there exists one overarching concern, one touchstone for testing all of Hecht’s poems, it is his abiding moral sense.

The poems seethe with Hecht’s grim appraisals of human failure, and no institution or endeavor—not art, religion, culture, politics—escapes indictment, whether satiric, bitter, or melancholy. Much has been made of Hecht’s pervasive melancholy, but it is not his worldly melancholy, his world-weariness, that I want to consider, but, rather, his spiritual melancholy—his striving for (and dejection at the loss of) if not God then redemption, justice, righteousness.

Despite Hecht’s dream of the upright life, his poems firmly inhabit the fallen world. He remains dubious, to say the least, about the possibility of man’s adhering to the cardinal virtues, yet he returns to them, and to their ever-present opposites, as to a wound that will not heal:

What do those distant thunderheads betide?
Nothing to do with us. Not our disgrace
That the raped corpse of a fourteen-year-old, tied
With friction tape, is found in a ditch, and a tide
Of violent crime breaks out. Yet the world grown
Wrathful, corrupt, once loosed a true floodtide
That inched inside the wards where the frail are tied
To their beds, invaded attics, climbed to disclose
Sharks in the nurseries, eels on the floors, to close
Over lives and cries and herds, and on that tide,
Which splintered barn, cottage and city piece-
Meal, one sole family rode the world to peace.

Think of the glittering morning when God’s peace
Flooded the heavens as it withdrew the tide:
Sweet grasses, endless fields of such rich peace
That for long after, when men dreamed of peace
It seemed a place where beast and human grace
A pastoral landscape, a Virgilian peace,
Or scene such as Mantegna’s masterpiece
Of kneeling shepherds. But that dream has grown
Threadbare, improbable, and our paupers groan
While “stockpiled warheads guarantee our peace,”
And troops, red-handed, muscle in for the close.
Ours is a wound that bleeds and will not close.

(Note Hecht’s masterly handling of the long periods here.) The voice in this canzone, entitled “Terms,” proceeds in the vein of Horace through Auden. Few poets today even attempt this kind of public rhetoric, which, in its search for universal values, leaves a sour taste in the mouths of the subjective, interior lyricists currently in fashion.

It was not always so. While public poetry has lately devolved into issue-specific tirades served up with a generous scoop of self-righteousness, masters of the public voice have made a decisive mark on modern and contemporary poetry, from Hardy and Yeats to Auden and Hecht. One hears overtones of Auden’s “Shield of Achilles” as a descant hovering above Hecht’s lines:

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
    Loitered about that vacancy, a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
    That girls were raped, that two boys knife a third,
    Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

Rape and murder are axioms for which the characters in both poems (who are there to represent us) quickly relieve themselves of any responsibility.

Like Auden’s, Hecht’s vision of the world as a place devoid of peace (save for the “peace” that stockpiled warheads guarantee) could not be bleaker. The true power of both “Terms” and “The Shield of Achilles,” however, lies in their moral indictment of the participants in such violence—whether active or passive—and, by extension, of the reader and even of the poet himself. Auden gets at it thus:

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
    Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
    A crowd of ordinary decent folk
    Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

Auden’s modern Golgotha features no redeemer, merely three prisoners similarly fated. The scene grows starkest not in its description of the imprisoned victims or even in the banality of the lounging officials but in the implication of the reader, who locates himself among the helpless “crowd of ordinary decent folk.” The line introducing the throng of spectators depicts them as blameless, while the second reveals them as quite the opposite. They neither move (either to flee or intervene) nor speak up (in protest or in witness). Life’s like that, we shrug along with them, as Auden reveals our complicity in the fallen state of things by turning a mirror on our resignation and acceptance. The reader may even feel pride at having sensitively apprehended Auden’s moral critique of the crowd, oblivious that Auden has included him in their number. Hecht works the same sly reversal in “Terms,” in which the litany of atrocities—rape and murder—are “Nothing to us. Not our disgrace.” Yet it is everything to us in a world where the dream of peace “has grown/ Threadbare, improbable.” Again, we are implicated: “Ours is a wound that bleeds and will not close.”

Hecht marshals his moral critique—in which, it should be said, he includes himself—not only in the public Horatian voice of “Terms” but also in more intimate lyric, narrative, and dramatic voices. “The Feast of Stephen,” from Hecht’s Collected Earlier Poems, contains a section in his narrative voice that also recalls the indictment of the bystanders in Auden’s “Shield of Achilles.” Here one man, Saul, stands in as the “audience character”:

Out in the rippled heat of a neighbor’s field,
In the kilowatts of noon, they’ve got one cornered.
The bugs are jumping, and the burly youths
Strip to the waist for the hot work ahead.
They go to arm themselves at the dry-stone wall,
Having flung down their wet and salty garments
At the feet of a young man whose name is Saul.
He watches sharply these superbly tanned
Figures with a swimmer’s chest and shoulders,
A miller’s thighs, with their self-conscious grace,
And in between their sleek, converging bodies,
Brilliantly oiled and burnished in the sun,
He catches a brief glimpse of blooded hair
And hears an unintelligible prayer.

The description recalls the martyrdom of St. Stephen, described by Luke in Acts 6–8. The presence of “kilowatts,” however, unmoors the scene from a strict imagining of the biblical account. (Auden’s barbed wire serves a similar function in the classical context of “Shield.”) Similarly, “They’ve got one cornered” suggests more the anonymity of a crime of racial persecution than the slaying of a specific saint.

The character of Saul, lifted straight from Acts, functions on two levels. In the context of the poem, he is the witness who observes and does nothing to stop the violence. He “watches sharply”: keenly or with shock and horror? The presence of Saul makes space for the reader within the moral framework of the scene. Without Saul, the stoning would unfold at a distance, with no possibility of outside intervention. To have him there but doing nothing places the reader there as well, asking us to consider occasions when we have stood by in the face of injustice.

Saul takes on further resonance through allusion to the biblical story, in which Saul (later the apostle Paul) looks on not helplessly but approvingly. The first line of Acts 8 baldly states Saul’s complicity. A further meaning that Hecht understands but does not need to state explicitly is the historical resonance of Saul’s presence in the narrative. By becoming, with his conversion, an apostle of Christ, Saul rises to the status of a Christian saint. Saul’s ultimate salvation, however, is not Hecht’s point, I think. As Hecht suggests elsewhere in his poems, the legacy of Christianity (which Saul becomes instrumental in propagating) and of all dogmatic religions for that matter, is not the story of God revealed to man so much as a chain of human atrocity and persecution in God’s name.

The poem closes with an “unintelligible prayer.” The account in Acts ends: “‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ Then he fell on his knees and cried aloud, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them,’ and then he died.” The fact that Hecht makes his prayer unintelligible suggests a number of melancholy possibilities for the poem: it is unintelligible because no God hears or understands it, or because the victim is too near death to be articulate, or because Saul stands (as we stand) too far outside of the circle, too detached, to make it out. Any way you look at it, Hecht’s version has no upside, no redemption, no forgiveness, only death.

Hecht has explained that he does not hold any dogmatic religion. Born to a Jewish family in New York City, he was educated largely in sectarian Christian schools. He has gained an understanding of both religions not as a practitioner but as an artist and a thinker. His complex and sustained engagement with religion and the Bible has grown up outside of traditional faith, I suspect, with the result that, in his poems, he has become that rather improbable phenomenon, a secular moralist. I say improbable because, if his moral sense is not based on the dogmatic teachings of a given religion, then what is it based on? It seems to derive from a kind of skeptical humanism that continually weighs biblical teaching with the lessons of art and culture both ancient and modern. Hecht knows his Greeks as fully as he knows his Torah, and his moral bearings are taken from the intersecting lines of Western thought throughout the ages.

Hecht’s moral orientation must also stem to some degree from his own life experience, and he has been unfortunate enough to witness evil at first hand. Evil, by sheer contrast, can be one of the clearest signposts to good. In Deuteronomy, for example, Moses says to the Israelites: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God brought you out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, and for that reason the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.” Later, Moses warns the Israelites that, if they fail to live justly, “The Lord will bring you sorrowing back to Egypt by that very road of which I said to you, ‘You shall not see that road again …’” “May the Lord strike you with Egyptian boils and with tumors, scabs, and itches, for which you will find no cure,” Moses adds at one point. Egypt, then, becomes for the Israelites the place of evil and enslavement to which they must never return. What keeps them from backsliding to Egypt is moral law. For Hecht, the evil to which we must never return, and which he himself has seen, is the Nazi death camps.

As a soldier in the Second World War, Hecht was present at the liberation of Flossenberg, an annex of Buchenwald, which, as he tells Philip Hoy in an invaluable book-length interview, “was both an extermination camp and a slave-labor camp.” “When we arrived,” Hecht continues,

the SS personnel had, of course, fled. Prisoners were dying at the 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.

There is a sense in which this concern with responsibility has been Hecht’s project ever since. As he writes in the fourth section of “Rites and Ceremonies”:

And to what purpose, as the darkness closes about
And the child screams in the jellied fire,
Had best be our present concern,
Here in the wilderness of comfort
In which we dwell.
Shall we now consider
The suspicious postures of our virtue,
The deformed consequences of our love,
The painful issues of our mildest acts?
Where is there one
Mad, poor and betrayed enough to find
Forgiveness for us, saying,
“None does offend,
None, I say,
None”?

Hecht explains to Philip Hoy, “It is pain that might be redemptive, but just possibly might not. This was a quandary, and a torment in which, for a long time, I dwelt.”

Hecht’s poems are clearly haunted by biography, and perhaps most markedly by the horrors that he encountered in that camp in the Bavarian forest. “The Book of Yolek,” a sestina about a young victim of just such a camp, contains these lines:

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 the 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.

Yolek as Elijah (the title of the poem itself has a biblical ring): Hecht suggests that all of us, including Hecht himself, must set a place at our tables for this murdered boy.

If proof is needed that Hecht’s technical mastery directly serves the semantic and emotional force of his poems, one need look no further than this poem. The recurrence of the word camp as a teleuton quietly maps the poet’s disillusionment, as his pleasant postprandial walk gives way to memories of the Holocaust. Hecht has positioned the word, which follows the pattern of repetition prescribed by the form, such that it occurs in consecutive lines directly in the center of the poem: “In close formation off to a special camp. // How often you have thought about that camp.” It is the first time in the poem that camp comes to mean death camp. In the previous two instances camp appears in the figure of speech “set up camp” and in the innocent phrase “summer camp.” Hecht deftly accentuates the horror in the poem by transforming the word before our eyes.

Any number of poems from the earlier and later collected poems explore the ramifications of guilt and denial, sin and redemption. There are “The Seven Deadly Sins,” from The Hard Hours, accompanied by woodcuts by the artist Leonard Baskin. Baskin’s woodcuts also figure in Hecht’s later sequence “The Presumptions of Death,” from Flight Among the Tombs. “Death the Whore,” from this sequence, suggests the ways in which we are haunted by conscience and memory. “Pig,” “Rites and Ceremonies,” “A Letter,” “Adam,” “Goliardic Song,” “‘Gladness of the Best,’” “Poem Upon the Lisbon Disaster,” and numerous other poems touching on morality, religion, and the Bible appear throughout The Collected Earlier Poems.

In The Collected Later Poems, “‘The Darkness and the Light Are Both Alike to Thee’” (which lends a part of its title to an entire collection), takes off from Psalms 139:12. Other poems from the volume The Darkness and the Light that touch on the Bible, morality, and sin include “Circles,” “Memory,” “Samson,” “Haman,” “Saul and David,” “Judith,” “Illumination,” “Look Deep,” “Lot’s Wife,” “The Witch of Endor,” “The Road to Damascus,” and “Elders.” “Indolence” takes a wry whack at the question of right and wrong, giving the lie again to the reader’s complacency. While poems similarly concerned may be found throughout the later poems, The Darkness and the Light is clearly Hecht’s book on the Bible.

Few poets have mined biblical stories as fruitfully as Hecht. As in “The Feast of Stephen,” “Sacrifice,” from The Darkness and the Light, maintains fidelity to the ancient narratives, while updating them with modern settings. Hecht’s take in the poem on the sacrifice of Isaac begins with sections in the voices, first, of Abraham (“He led me, knowing where my heart would break,/ Into temptation”) and, then, of Isaac himself (“We were sentenced and reprieved by the same Voice”). The third section tells the story of a German soldier’s encounter with a rural family in France in 1945. The German army is in full retreat, the straggling infantry left to fend for themselves in the French countryside. As a precaution, the family disassembles their bicycle and conceals the parts in the upper boughs of their orchard. At dawn one morning, while the family is at breakfast (another meal disturbed, as in “The Book of Yolek”), the soldier comes demanding a bicycle. The father explains that they have none. The soldier lacks the time to search the property, so he:

Judiciously singled out the eldest son,
A boy perhaps fourteen, but big for his years,
Obliging him to place himself alone
Against the whitewashed front wall of the house.
Then, at the infallible distance of ten feet,
With rifle pointed right at the boy’s chest,
The soldier shouted what was certainly meant
To be his terminal order: BICYCLETTE!

It was still early on a chilly morning.
The water in the tire-treads of the road
Lay clouded, polished pale and chalked with frost,
Like the paraffin-sealed coverings of preserves.
The very grass was a stiff lead-crystal gray,
Though splendidly prismatic where the sun
Made its slow way between the lingering shadows
Of nearby fence posts and more distant trees.
There was leisure enough to take full note of this
In the most minute detail as the soldier held
Steady his index finger on the trigger.

It wasn’t charity. Perhaps mere prudence,
Saving a valuable round of ammunition
For some more urgent crisis. Whatever it was,
The soldier reslung his rifle on his shoulder,
Turned wordlessly and walked on down the road
The departed German vehicles had taken.

There followed a long silence, a long silence.
For years they lived together in that house,
Though daily tasks, through all the family meals,
In agonized, unviolated silence.

The poem works as a palimpsest, overlaying the biblical narrative with the modern in a way that sheds light on both. Certain biblical commentators have suggested that, in the sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham, in fact, is testing God. In this interpretation, Abraham has no intention of killing his son but raises the knife knowing that God will not make him go through with it. If He does, then Abraham will know that He is not a God worth following. Clearly, Hecht sees this differently.

Ultimately, the story of the French father and the German soldier shows the father as the greater villain. The soldier, acting out of expediency, puts the father in an unspeakable situation, yet the father needs only to hand over the bicycle to save his son. This he refuses to do. The soldier, not the father, then shows mercy on the boy. The poem casts a bleak light on the biblical story, suggesting that God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son for no good reason, for a bicycle. Was Abraham right to agree to the sacrifice? God and the soldier call off the death in the end, but the resulting rift between father and son, the silence that ensues, marks both Hecht’s poem and the biblical tale with extreme bitterness.

As a further indictment of the father, Hecht includes the long passage of description in which the reader receives a tour of the landscape. The father has plenty of time to reconsider his decision, yet he keeps silent. Unlike Abraham, the father has no reason to hope that the soldier will rescind his terrible threat. Hecht places his characters in moments of crisis, which so often reveal them as failing to do the right thing. Think of the Pole in “More Light! More Light!,” who initially refuses to bury alive two Jews until he is threatened with the same fate. Ultimately, he gives in and is shot anyway. The Pole bleeds to death over a number of 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.”

Hecht understands the crucial difference between morality and moralizing. He never places himself above the reader. Even his satiric pieces, usually in dramatic voices, don’t excoriate their subjects in a way that suggests the poet flies free of similar failings. As he tells Philip Hoy, for example, “The speaker in my poem [“Green: An Epistle”], who is admittedly partly me, has succeeded in deceiving himself into believing that his long-suffering patience and forbearance, his stoic endurance, have paid off in the form of a noble and selfless character, and in this he is profoundly mistaken.” Other dramatic monologues, such as “The Venetian Vespers,” similarly indict an invented persona that is partly Hecht himself. At the end of “Green,” Hecht deftly overlays the recognition of the sin of pride with the recognition of the presence of pride in the self:

Or, like a sunbather, whose lids retain
A greenish, gemmed impression of the sun
In lively, fluctuant geometries,
You sometimes contemplate a single image,
Utterly silent, utterly at rest.
It is of someone, a stranger, quite unknown,
Sitting alone in a foreign-looking room,
Gravely intent at a table propped with matchbooks,
Writing this very poem—about me.

It is to Hecht’s great credit as a writer and as a moralist that he takes pains not to delude himself. His constant scrutiny of the wiles of vice penetrates beneath the blandishment of the ego. He does not spare his own amour propre, nor does he spare the reader’s. In this sense, reading Hecht can be a challenging experience, difficult not on the level of intelligibility, as with so many poets writing after modernism, but on the level of moral accounting. It takes a strong stomach to turn our attention inward on our own failings, as Hecht’s poems demand that we do. Prudence, self-scrutiny, culpability, and the snares of self-deception and pride: for the melancholy consideration of these and other matters of moral consequence readers may find it hard to give thanks to Anthony Hecht, yet it will mark some measure of their humanity if they do.

Notes
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1. Collected Later Poems, by Anthony Hecht; Alfred A. Knopf, 231 pages, $25. Go back to the text.
2. Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy, by Philip Hoy; Between the Lines, 144 pages, $22 (paper). Go back to the text.