A thickness of particulars : the poetry of Anthony Hecht PDF
Preview A thickness of particulars : the poetry of Anthony Hecht
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/15, SPi A THICKNESS OF PARTICULARS OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/15, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/15, SPi A THICKNESS OF PARTICULARS THE POETRY OF ANTHONY HECHT JONATHAN F. S. POST 1 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/15, SPi 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Jonathan Post 2015 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2015941921 ISBN 978–0–19–966071–1 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, cr0 4yy Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/15, SPi For Susan In memory of her mother Lydia Gallick (1913–2015) OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/15, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/15, SPi Preface A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht grew out of a long period of intensive work devoted to preparing an edition of Hecht’s Selected Letters, which appeared in 2013, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Before and concurrent with that project, I had the pleasure of teaching Hecht’s poetry for a few years at Yale and many at UCLA to undergraduates and graduate students alike; and long before that, as a graduate student, I had the opportunity to study with Hecht in a seminar on William Butler Yeats and Theodore Roethke at the University of Rochester in 1972. I also house-sat while Hecht and his family were away for a semester at Harvard, and although I can’t claim any special knowledge or “ensorcelment,” as Hecht might say, emanating from the walls of his well-decorated, spacious upstate home, I made certain use of the many volumes in the Oxford poetry series in his downstairs den for which I remain still grateful. Nor can I trace, precisely, in this book more than a few points in the years of friendship that followed until his death in 2004. Probably the most important was developing an ear for the distinctive sound of his voice, the layering of (at times gleefully boyish) humor that infiltrates his verse and offsets and further enriches the darker broodings for which his poetry has become justly famous. Hecht was always reticent about discussing his poetry, modest to a fault I now rue. Sensing this, I was reluctant to ask him many questions. We often exchanged our writings but usually in printed form, an exchange I valued for, among other reasons, allowing a friendship to continue to flourish while living on opposite coasts. In any event, the best preparation for understanding his writings, I came to discover, lay elsewhere, but it was in accord with the same advice he frequently gave to younger poets setting forth: to read, and in my case also to teach, as much poetry as possible, which I did, ini- tially with concentration on the poets of the English Renaissance—as it was then called—and the seventeenth century: Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Milton, and Marvell, in particular, whose poetry in large OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/15, SPi viii preface quantities Hecht had committed to memory and, as was true with many poets of his generation, was foundational to much of his own work. But, of course, this marked only a beginning with regard to a poet who possessed a special knack for summoning spirits from the “vasty deep” in strikingly new and original ways, as Christopher Ricks has deftly explored of late.1 My own study draws frequently on Hecht’s letters, and as a conse- quence, it offers something of a biographical context for understanding his poetry, but its general purpose is not biography per se.2 That large project is being pursued by David Yezzi. Mine is intended to form, rather, an introduction to the poetry, attentive to its particular riches, with an eye toward the whole career, and making special use of the letters and his other critical writings as they cast light on these features. This includes Anthony Hecht, in conversation with Philip Hoy (1998), Hecht’s highly illuminating “autobiography,” a work I read immediately upon publication but whose charms are such that I returned to it only after having drafted my thoughts on a particular section. Although there have been a number of specialized studies of Hecht’s writings, and, of course, many reviews, there has been no book-length study of the career—and indeed none was possible until recently, since Hecht was active as a poet right up to his death in 2004. Besides taking advantage of the letters, I have also made use of the extensive materials in the Hecht Archive at Emory University, includ- ing drafts of some of the poems. Although my study is meant to provide an overview of the poet, and thus has a chronological cast to it, it also includes several chapters offering thematic angles. One of these is on the subject of ekphrasis. With good reason, Hecht has been called “our most painterly poet,”3 a term that simultaneously reminds us of the significant place works of art have in his poetry as well as his own penchant for language often as steeped in color—in the rhetorical sense—as it is exact in its phrasing. A second chapter traces the wide 1. Ricks, True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 2. For the convenience of the reader, I have included page references to those letters included in my edition of The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), abbreviated hereafter as SL. Those without page references are to letters that either remain in private hands or are in the Hecht Archive and noted as such. 3. Robyn Creswell, “Painting and Privacy: On Anthony Hecht,” Raritan 21 (Winter, 2002), 20. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 01/10/15, SPi preface ix arc of Shakespeare’s influence on Hecht’s poetry. Other ancestral writers could have filled this role; Hecht was among the most deeply allusive poets of his generation, and, consequently, many authors, ancient as well as modern, make more than cameo appearances in my study. But Shakespeare is his most frequent point of reference, even more so than scripture—with allusion or echo often entailing resonances beyond citation. Indeed, Don Paterson, in his New Commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, recalls an amusing incident in which Hecht is said to have attributed his affectedly English accent—always surprising to a first- time listener—to his having “read a great deal of Shakespeare as a young man.”4 Hecht was a spell-binding, beautifully articulate reader of poetry, it should be said, although I am hardly the only person to say so, and Shakespeare, or rather Shakespeare as spoken on the stage in the mid-twentieth century, served not simply as a model for utterance but played into the shaping of individual poems themselves, indeed into helping Hecht navigate a crucial junction in his mid-life shift toward writing longer poems of a dramatic character as well as serving as a point of departure for one of his great, sustained comic flights in “Love for Four Voices” and the shorter, more intimate “Peripeteia,” certainly among the finest love poems of its generation. One of the benefits of reading published reviews of The Selected Letters is hearing from others about their response to Hecht. On the subject of Hecht and war, Colm Tóibín gets it just right. Quoting Randall Jarrell’s remark in a review of Marianne Moore that “the real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time,” Tóibín then applies that observation to a more obvious candidate, Hecht.5 I take the point to be not that war is the only topic for a war poet but that a war poet can never be free of the subject, regardless of contemporary events. Oblivion is not to be hired. And so it is with Hecht. I have tried to give particular substance to this view by having his much anthologized poem, “The Book of Yolek,” serve as a brief P.O.E. (point of embar- kation) for this study. Only one other poem receives a single chapter, 4. Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 158–9. The anecdote is attached to Paterson’s reading of Sonnet 53, which also spurred the observation that “Millions of Strange Shadows, incidentally, is one of Anthony Hecht’s finest books” (158–9). For a slightly different account of the origins of his accent see Hecht’s interview with J. D. McClatchy in the Paris Review, 108 (Fall, 1988), 163–4. 5. Tóibín, London Review of Books, 8 August 2013, 22.
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