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The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht

Author : Anthony Hecht

Publisher : JHU Press

Page : 398 pages

File Size : 27,12 MB

Release : 2013-01-01

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 142140785X

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Book Description

Spanning seven decades, these often intimate, brilliantly astute letters by the eminent poet Anthony Hecht reflect a body of work that influenced the history of twentieth-century American poetry. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anthony Hecht (1923–2004) was known not only for his masterful control of form and language but also for his wit and humor. With the help of Helen Hecht, the poet’s widow, Jonathan F. S. Post combed through more than 4,000 letters to produce an intimate look into the poet’s mind and art across a lifetime. The letters range from Hecht’s early days at summer camp to college at Bard, to the front lines of World War II, to travels abroad in France and Italy, to marriage, and to fame as a poet and critic. Along the way, Hecht corresponded with well-known poets such as John Hollander, James Merrill, Anne Sexton, and Richard Wilbur. Those interested in the lives of contemporary poets will read these highly personal letters with delight and surprise.



On the Laws of the Poetic Art

Author : Anthony Hecht

Publisher : Princeton University Press

Page : 224 pages

File Size : 33,62 MB

Release : 2023-08-15

Category : Art

ISBN : 0691252815

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Book Description

A magisterial exploration of poetry’s place in the fine arts by one of the twentieth century's leading poets In this book, eminent poet Anthony Hecht explores the art of poetry and its relationship to the other fine arts. While the problems he treats entail both philosophic and theoretical discussion, he never allows abstract speculation to overshadow his delight in the written texts that he introduces, or in the specific examples of painting and music to which he refers. After discussing literature’s links with painting and music, Hecht investigates the theme of paradise and wilderness, especially in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He then turns to the question of public and private art, exploring the ways in which all the arts participate in balances between private and public modes of discourse, and between an exclusive or elitist role and the openly political. Beginning with a discussion of architecture as an illustration of a more general theme of discord and balance, the penultimate lecture probes the inner contradictions of works of art and our reactions to them, while the final piece concerns art and morality.



Collected Later Poems of Anthony Hecht

Author : Anthony Hecht

Publisher : Knopf

Page : 256 pages

File Size : 27,23 MB

Release : 2009-03-04

Category : Poetry

ISBN : 0307555208

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Book Description

Anthony Hecht, now in his eightieth year, has earned a place alongside such poets as W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop. Here under one cover are his three most recent collections–The Transparent Man, Flight Among the Tombs, and The Darkness and the Light. The perfect companion to his Collected Earlier Poems (continuously in print since 1990), this book brings the eloquent sound of Hecht’s music to bear on a wide variety of human dramas: from a young woman dying of leukemia to the tangled love affairs of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; from Death as the director of Hollywood films to the unexpected image of Marcel Proust as a figure skater. He glides with a gaining confidence, inscribes Tentative passages, thinks again, backtracks, Comes to a minute point, Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes, Large Palmer cursives and smooth entrelacs, Preoccupied, intent On a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant script Incised with twin steel blades and qualified Perfectly to express, With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly gripped Behind his back, attentively, clear-eyed, A glancing happiness.



Collected Earlier Poems

Author : Anthony Hecht

Publisher :

Page : 272 pages

File Size : 50,97 MB

Release : 1991-01-01

Category : American poetry

ISBN : 9780192828033

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Book Description

Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Hecht has long been regarded as one of the great modern American poets, and is hailed by many as the unofficial Poet Laureate' of the USA. This volume brings together all the poems contained in The Hard Hours (1967), Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), and The Venetian Vespers (1980), and versions of Joseph Brodsky's early poems, which Hecht was the first to translate. These three distinguished books affirm Hecht's reputation as a technically accomplished poet capable of powerfully expressing deep sentiment and original thought.



Selected Poems of Anthony Hecht

Author : Anthony Hecht

Publisher : Knopf

Page : 290 pages

File Size : 16,95 MB

Release : 2011-03-22

Category : Poetry

ISBN : 0375711988

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Book Description

Alongside Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, and other pillars of twentieth-century poetry, Anthony Hecht joins the Borzoi Poetry series. Hecht, whose writing rings with the cadences of the King James Bible, and who, as an infantryman at the end of World War II, participated in the liberation of the concentration camps, lived and experienced the best and worst of the twentieth century. Readers of this volume—the first selected poems to be made from Hecht’s seven individual volumes—will be captivated by Hecht’s dark music and allusions to the literature of the past. As J. D. McClatchy explains in his introduction, Hecht was a poet for whom formal elegance was inextricably bound up with the dramatic force, thematic ambition, and powerful emotions in each poem. The rules of his art, which he both honored and transformed, are “moral principles meant finally to reveal the structure of human dilemmas and sympathies.” This elevated sense of what poetry can accomplish defines our experience of reading Hecht, and will ensure his place in the canon for years to come. Adam and Eve knew such perfection once, God’s finger in the cloud, and on the ground Nothing but springtime, nothing else at all. But in our fallen state where the blood hunts For blood, and rises at the hunting sound, What do we know of lasting since the fall? Who has not, in the oil and heat of youth, Thought of the flourishing of the almond tree, The grasshopper, and the failing of desire, And thought his tongue might pierce the secrecy Of the six-pointed starlight, and might choir A secret-voweled, unutterable truth? —from “A Poem for Julia”



Melodies Unheard

Author : Anthony Hecht

Publisher : JHU Press

Page : 334 pages

File Size : 49,31 MB

Release : 2003-05-22

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 9780801869563

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Book Description

In these essays, acclaimed poet and critic Anthony Hecht explores the ways in which poetry can be read and the many pleasures it affords. Ranging from Shakespeare's sonnets to Eliot, Frost, and Simic, Melodies Unheard offers profound insight into poetic form, meter, rhyme, and meaning--into the mysteries of poetry itself. Anthony Hecht's vast knowledge of literature and his gift for mesmerizing argument are both amply present in Melodies Unheard. Whether defending the sestina against accusations of boredom and dolefulness or examining the structure of Shakespeare's sonnets or unraveling some of the complexity of Moby-Dick, these essays are models of civility, candor, and grace. I know of no other poet, certainly none of Anthony Hecht's stature, who sheds as much light on the intricacies and hidden designs of poems and who does it with such style.--Mark Strand Anthony Hecht declares himself 'a poet first and only secondarily a critic, ' but Melodies Unheard proves again that he is a master in both trades. His discourse on such subjects as rhyme, the sestina, and 'the music of forms' is both scholarly and delightful; his articles on individual poets are finely done; and best of al



The Hard Hours

Author : Anthony Hecht

Publisher :

Page : 116 pages

File Size : 26,29 MB

Release : 1968

Category :

ISBN :

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A Thickness of Particulars

Author : Jonathan F. S. Post

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 317 pages

File Size : 43,36 MB

Release : 2015

Category : Literary Criticism

ISBN : 0199660719

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Book Description

A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht is the first book-length study of one of the great formal poets of the later twentieth century (1923-2004). Making use of Hecht's correspondence, which the author edited, it situates Hecht's writings in the context of pre- and post-World-War II verse, including poetry written by W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, and Richard Wilbur. In nine chapters, the book ranges over Hecht's full career, with special emphasis placed on the effects of the war on his memory; Hecht participated in the final push by the Allied troops in Europe and was involved in the liberation of the Flossenburg Concentration Camp. The study explores the important place Venice and Italy occupied in his imagination as well as the significance of the visual and dramatic arts and music more generally. Chapters are devoted to analyzing celebrated individual poems, such as "The Book of Yolek" and "The Venetian Vespers"; the making of particular volumes, as in the case of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning "The Hard Hours"; the poet's mid-career turn toward writing dramatic monologues and longer narrative poems ("Green, An Epistle," "The Grapes," and "See Naples and Die") and ekphrases; the inspiring use he made of Shakespeare, especially in "A Love for Four Voices," his delightful riff on "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; and his collaboration with the artist Leonard Baskin in the "Presumptions of Death" series from "Flight Among the Tombs." The book seeks to unfold the itinerary of a highly civilized mind brooding, with wit, over the dark landscape of the later twentieth century in poems of unrivalled beauty.



Club Q

Author : DAVIS

Publisher :

Page : 96 pages

File Size : 20,43 MB

Release : 2020-10-15

Category :

ISBN : 9781911379010

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Book Description

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Winner of the 15th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, judged by Edward Hirsch. CLUB Q is a book of mid-American yearning for both exceptionalism and belonging. Beginning as a coming-out narrative, the poems track the story of a gay boy growing up in Colorado Springs, under the spectres of the U.S. military, megachurch Christianity, and chain-restaurant capitalism. As the speaker ages, he examines his complicity in his isolation and struggles to define community on his own terms. Through formal invention, high- and low-culture references, and deep wordplay, CLUB Q invites the reader to inhabit the precise imprecision of our human situation. "CLUB Q is an elegant, unsparing book of inquiry, where 'curiosity / is the recognition of ignorance / as a kind of sickness.' One eyebrow cocked, queer as fuck, James Davis lays bare our various longings to connect, and the attendant absurdity: men in a hotel room who 'shared a queen / and left no stain;' the internet that, 'like water, / transmits the smell of blood in all directions.' This droll and formally promiscuous poet lets 'desire // italicize our somberest sentiments.' It's hard not to love this nerdy, sexy, vulnerable first book."--Randall Mann "Reading James Davis' CLUB Q reminds me of slipping, long ago, into that mysterious Houston bar Marfreless (which literally possessed no address): once inside the utterly dark, soft ambiance, you felt your way through its space to settle onto the most forgiving of couches, down stiff drinks, luxuriate in the most animated and revealing of conversations. CLUB Q is one of the funniest and sharpest books of poems I've read in a long time. James Davis possesses a killer intellect, and his formal chops are bar none."--Cate Marvin "In this incredible debut, James Davis catalogs the excesses and deficits of American culture, from the schlock of millennial childhoods (Fruitopia! Alpha-Bits! Street Fighter II!) to the confounding terms of our present moment, in which 'creative is a noun.' These ingenious poems tackle sticky questions about family and class, and what it means to be 'queer / in a military town where cadets / count out football scores in pushups.' They also celebrate letters and words themselves--the sheer abundance of language and the worlds it makes possible. CLUB Q is funny and wise, and it blew me away."--Caki Wilkinson



Shuffle and Breakdown

Author : Cody Walker

Publisher : Waywiser Press

Page : 104 pages

File Size : 11,96 MB

Release : 2008

Category : Poetry

ISBN :

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Poetry. Cody Walker's SHUFFLE AND BREAKDOWN, his first collection and a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in 2005 and 2006, is a work of comic brilliance and devastating irony. From Abbott and Costello: The Alzheimer's Years to a series of letters to Whitman from his imagined grandson, this is a wondrous strange book that operates with the precise timing of a great joke, while bracing itself for dissolution and worse. "You'll need your wits about you when you read this astonishing book. Cody Walker keeps working surprises, setting traps, yanking rugs from underfoot--and I must say, I enjoyed myself no end. Escalation, 2007, for instance, sounds as if written by a Mother Goose high on LSD. Walker is unique, no mere trickster but a serious craftsman who blurs the line of demarcation between sober poetry and light verse. Though he sometimes writes in forms usually frivolous--limericks, double dactyls, clerihews--he can do so with dark import. An amazing series of letters from a fictitious grandson of Walt Whitman is alone worth the price of admission."--X. J. Kennedy "In this case, the voice comes from some ways off, at an unexpected angle. Cody Walker's poems are singular, and severally strong. SHUFFLE AND BREAKDOWN is more than an assemblage; it's a collection with a subtending architecture, so that while one is savoring local pleasures--a brash simile, an odd and antic rhyme--one is aware of the book's shapely whole. Like Roethke, who also had a Pacific Northwest background, Walker makes adroit use of fractured nursery rhyme. Like Whitman, with whom he shares a taste for the out-flung, Walker means to be comprehensive. But SHUFFLE AND BREAKDOWN is more than a toting up of its influences. Here's a wry and rueful and utterly appealing new sensibility."--Brad Leithauser