R.I.P., Anthony Hecht

Anthony Hecht, American poet, has died.

I have always found his poems a bit frightening. They’re very melancholy (he was famous for his “melancholia”), and he often turns his microscope (or telescope, however you want to put it) onto the horrors of the world. Cruelty, war, genocide … they’re tough poems. The TONE of the poems also make them frightening, outside of the subject matter. He speaks in the overly formal voice of someone who has seen too much (as in Ms. Dickinson’s “after great pain a formal feeling comes”?), who battles great demons, and who is doing his damndest to keep himself together. He won the Pulitzer Prize. He was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. He was a giant in the field of poetry.

He described his work as “formalist ironic” (a sort of inside joke), and modeled his poetry after WH Auden.

Enormously successful in his own lifetime, he used a very formal almost old-school type of poetry (regular meter, and rhyme schemes) to write poem after poem on the chaotic terrible events of the 20th century. He was an infantryman in WWII and witnessed, firsthand, the concentration camps. He has said that what he saw in WWI was more “grotesque” than he could even find words for (and for Hecht to admit he couldn’t find the words – any words – is to tell you how beyond the pale that experience was for him).

Here’s a great New Criterion article about Hecht (written when Hecht’s Collected Poems came out – Hecht was still alive at the time). In this article, David Yezzi takes on the “charge” that Hecht is a “formalist” poet. I like what he has to say:

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.

Hecht is often lumped in with other “Poets of World War II” (I think he’s even included in a book on the subject) – and it’s not hard to see why, judging from his dark and terrified subject-matter.

His poem “Rites and Ceremonies” is the poem that announced his entry onto the “important poet” stage. How does one adequately face (and deal with) evil? How does one actually deal with seeing the walking skeletons at Buchenwald? That generation of men came home forever changed from what they had seen. Consider this stanza from “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’s topic: Man’s capacity for evil. Man’s inhumanity to man. In this great review of a book of Hecht’s poems, (note the date of the review – sheesh) – Kirsch, to my taste, describes what is special about Hecht:

Yet this theme has a double irony in Hecht’s poetry, for at the same time as he reflects on the shattering of humanism, his own language continues to pay homage to it. Hecht’s regular meter and rhyme, his formal diction (“Much casual death”), and his clear expository sentences betray none of the hesitation that his subject seems to demand. The means of expression are not called into doubt by the horror of what must be expressed. Quite the contrary. Hecht insists on still greater decorum and rigor when his theme is darkness and chaos. He is like the courtier of a deposed monarch, punctually attending the shrunken levees of reason.

Through seven books and nearly five decades, Hecht’s poetry has maintained this disciplined disjunction between form and subject. He writes very often of the forces of dissolution – evil, chaos, lust, slovenliness – but always in a decorous style, as though these subjects were explosive chemicals that can only be handled with tongs.

His subject matter is the darkness at the heart of man. And yet the voice he uses is formal, cold, clear.

And now I leave you with my personal favorite Anthony Hecht poem – it’s called “The Dover Bitch”, an obvious parody of “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. It’s another side of Hecht – funny, biting, cynical, smart.

His voice will be much missed.

The Dover Bitch
by Anthony Hecht

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, ‘Try to be true to me,
And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.’
Well now, I knew this girl. It’s true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn’t judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She’s really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it’s a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’ Amour.