Anthony Hecht – författare

The formidable talents of Anthony Hecht, one of the most gifted of contemporary American poets, and Helen Bacon, a classical scholar, are here brought to bear on this vibrant translation of Aeschylus' much underrated tragedy The Seven Against Thebes. The third and only remaining play in a trilogy dealing with related events, The Seven Against Thebes tells the story of the Argive attempt to claim the Kingdom of Thebes, and of the deaths of the brothers Eteocles and Polyneices, each by the others hand. Long dismissed by critics as ritualistic and lacking in dramatic tension, Seven Against Thebes is revealed by Hecht and Bacon as a work of great unity and drama, one exceptionally rich in symbolism and imagery.

The formidable talents of Anthony Hecht, one of the most gifted of contemporary American poets, and Helen Bacon, a classical scholar, are here brought to bear on this vibrant translation of Aeschylus'' much underrated tragedy The Seven Against Thebes. The third and only remaining play in a trilogy dealing with related events, The Seven Against Thebes tells the story of the Argive attempt to claim the Kingdom of Thebes, and of the deaths of the brothers Eteocles and Polyneices, each by the others hand. Long dismissed by critics as ritualistic and lacking in dramatic tension, Seven Against Thebes is revealed by Hecht and Bacon as a work of great unity and drama, one exceptionally rich in symbolism and imagery.

The poetry of Anthony Hecht has been praised by Harold Bloom and Ted Hughes, among others, for its sure control of difficult material and its unique music and visual precision. This new volume is the fruit of a mellowing maturity that carries with it a smoky bitterness, a flavor of ancient and experienced wisdom, as in this stanza from “Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-seven”:A turn, a glide, a quarter-turn and bow,The stately dance advances; these are airsBone-deep and numbing as I should know by now,Diminishing the cast, like musical chairs. Hecht’s verse—by turns lyric and narrative, formal and free—is grounded in the compassion that comes from a deep understanding of every kind of human depredation, yet is tempered by flashes of wry comedy, and still more by innocent pleasure in the gifts of the natural world. Followers of his poetry will recognize an evolution of style in many of these poems—a quiet and understated voice, passing through darkness toward realms of delight.From the Hardcover edition.

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, inscribesTentative passages, thinks again, backtracks,Comes to a minute point,Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes,Large Palmer cursives and smooth entrelacs,Preoccupied, intentOn a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant scriptIncised with twin steel blades and qualifiedPerfectly to express,With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly grippedBehind his back, attentively, clear-eyed,A glancing happiness.From the Hardcover edition.

Divided into two parts, this new book contains a collaboration with the artist Leonard Baskin called "Presumptions of Death, " reproducing 22 masterly wood engravings and all of Hecht''s other poems written since his last book, The Transparent Man.From the Hardcover edition.

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 groundNothing but springtime, nothing else at all.But in our fallen state where the blood huntsFor 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 secrecyOf the six-pointed starlight, and might choirA secret-voweled, unutterable truth?—from “A Poem for Julia”From the Trade Paperback edition.

THE VENETIAN VESPERS (1979)“In its clear-eyed mercy toward human weakness, Anthony Hecht’s poetry goes from strength to strength.  The Venetian Vespers is at once an intense corroboration and an ample extension of his subtle, supple talents.  Nothing humane is alien to him…  There is a handful of short poems that are fostered alike by beauty and fear.  But it is the four long poems that confirm Hecht as a poet of the widest apprehensions and comprehension, and this without the gigantism that so haunts American poetic ambition.” —Christopher Ricks, The New York Times Book Review MILLIONS OF STRANGE SHADOWS (1977)“The high artistry of Anthony Hecht has been to nurture his own gift, and to work at it with the deliberateness and steadiness that it deserved from him... Emotional intensity and formal power were combined in Hecht from his beginnings… The thirty poems in Millions of Strange Shadows are all fully written, but several truly are the best he has published and are very likely to endure.  The very best is ‘Green: An Epistle,’ which is a lesson in profound, controlled subjectivity and self-revelation, an exact antithesis to the opaque squalors of ‘confessional’ poets.  Almost equally remarkable is ‘Coming Home,’ in which the poet John Clare receives a deeper interpretation than any critic has afforded him…”                                                                                              —Harold Bloom, The New Republic THE HARD HOURS (1968)“Anthony Hecht’s first volume of poems, A Summoning of Stones, established him as one of the most accomplished of his extremely accomplished generation.  His work was remarkable enough for its classical poise and elegance, but it also had a weight which set it apart.  Since then his poetry has come clear in a direction nobody could have predicted…He did the most difficult thing of all: this most fastidious and elegant of poets shed every artifice and began to write with absolute raw simplicity and directness.  Only a poet with an immense burden of something to say ever dreams of taking this course, and only an inspired artist can bring it off.  The result here has been some of the most powerful and unforgettable poems at present being written in America,”—Ted Hughes

A magisterial exploration of poetry’s place in the fine arts by one of the twentieth century's leading poetsIn 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.