Some writers win our respect, others our admiration, and a very few inspire something like love—is there a nearer word for the intensity of feeling, elevation, and devotion occasioned by the best writing?1 Poets enter into fond liaisons with their literary precursors, either promiscuously or chastely. Anthony Hecht (1923–2004) noted his affection for a range of poets—Donne, Herbert, and Hardy often chief among them—but none, I think, had a more profound affect on him, both personally and poetically, than Shakespeare. Not even the Bible—which Hecht read obsessively and which figures directly in many of his poems, particularly the late poems of The Darkness and the Light—quite rivals the Bard as a continual source for subjects and allusions, from Hecht’s juvenilia to his final poems.

Not even the Bible quite rivals the Bard as a continual source for subjects and allusions, from Hecht’s juvenilia to his final poems.

In addition to the poems that are steeped in Shakespeare in large part—“Peripeteia” (The Tempest), “A Love for Four Voices” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and “The Venetian Vespers” (The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet), there are countless Shakespearean epigraphs, quotations, allusions, and echoes throughout Hecht’s work, in both his lyric poems as well as, naturally, his blank-verse dramatic monologues. Hecht himself wrote to his friend Ashley Brown of the undercurrent of King Lear running through his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection The Hard Hours (1967). Ten years further on, nearly half