undefinedAnthony Hecht and Gwendolyn Brooks, 1987. Photograph by William Stafford

Anthony Hecht is an aristocrat among poets. It’s not that his work stands apart from others’, but that his poems hold themselves to a high standard, and in their purposes and sympathies is a natural nobility: important matters dealt with in a manner that is contained, dignified, open, full of feeling; life viewed from the vantage of spirit. He even looks the part. With his solid build and sad eyes, his heraldic gray hair and pointed beard, he resembles a benevolent Shakespearean duke. The lofty rhetorical grace of his work also brings to mind another, finer age. But just beneath their elegant surfaces his poems often manifest an unnerving, nearly Jacobean intensity, by means of which he explores the baffled suffering of human history and the helpless isolation of the private life. He has not written as much as some of his contemporaries, but because of their intellectual power and emotional generosity more of his poems are memorable—indeed, now a permanent part of modern literature, and of the imagination of his readers.

   He was born in New York City on January 16, 1923, the son of a stockbroker. He graduated from Bard College in 1944, later studied at Kenyon, and took an M.A. from Columbia in 1950; but between those hitches in school he served in the army, from 1943 until 1946, in France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, and eight months of occupation duty in Japan. His first book of poems, A Summoning of Stones, appeared in 1954. His second, The Hard Hours, was not published until 1967, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Two more volumes appeared in the next decade, Millions of Strange Shadows in 1977 and The Venetian Vespers in 1979. With Helen Bacon he has translated Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes (1973), and with John Hollander he edited Jiggery-Pokery (1967), a collection by several poets of witty double dactyls (a form Hecht invented). A gathering of his essays, Obbligati, was published in 1986. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations as well as the Prix de Rome in 1950 and the Bollingen Prize in 1983. He was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1970, and the next year was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975, and has received honorary degrees from Bard and the University of Rochester. He has taught at Bard, Smith, for eighteen years at Rochester, and since 1985 has been professor of English at Georgetown University. From 1982 until 1984 he served as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress.

   He lives with his second wife, Helen (the author of several renowned cookbooks), and their teenage son Evan in a handsome, white-painted brick house in a comfortable section of Washington, near the Japanese embassy. Settled into oversized wicker chairs, we spoke on an enclosed porch just off the living room, with its grand piano and a wall of prints by Samuel Palmer, Braque, Rouault, and Matisse. The poet works upstairs. There is a reading room there, with bookcases of poetry and literary criticism dwindling into nonfiction, and across the hallway Hecht’s study. On his desk is a bronze bust of himself in 1954, the work of Gilbert Franklin. Nearby are photographs of Marianne Moore, Joseph Brodsky, John Crowe Ransom, Mona Van Duyn standing at Keats’s grave, and his wife and son. There are a lot of records and cassettes here too, an O.E.D., shelves of Shakespeare, an encyclopedia and bibles, books on travel, theology and art history. While he was showing me around, I was struck again by qualities I remembered from his poetry: an elaborate courtesy that is never stuffy, a formality that can break into broad humor or streetwise slang. Most striking of all is his voice: a plummy, resonant baritone that, to my ear, sounds like no one else so much as the actor Claude Rains.

 

INTERVIEWER

I remember being at a reading of yours some time back, and overhearing two people sitting behind me. “He’s English, isn’t he?” the one said to her neighbor. “No,” the other replied, “he was born in Germany and then was forced to flee to England before the war.” Obviously those two had been listening carefully—to your tones of voice, and to the subject of some of your poems. It’s just the facts they got all wrong.

ANTHONY HECHT

I suppose my voice must sound affected in some way, though there is no “natural” diction or pronunciation into which I might relapse. I’ve heard my voice recorded, and by now I feel it sounds just like me. Doubtless it’s a mask of some sort; a fear or shame of something, very likely of being Jewish, a matter I am no longer in the least ashamed of, though once it was a painful embarrassment. When my voice took on its present character I just can’t say. But in high school—the Horace Mann School for Boys, in Riverdale, New York—I played the role of John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest, and I worked hard at my speech for that play. I may add that Julian Beck, of the Living Theater, played Lady Bracknell in that production.

INTERVIEWER

Did you have any other famous schoolmates?

HECHT

Yes, Jack Kerouac was in my class. He won a football scholarship to Columbia, and broke his leg in freshman practice, which kept him out of the army later on, so that he joined the merchant marine, a service that gave him time to really read fiction for the first time. He was a gentle and kind fellow as I remember him, but at school it didn’t seem as if we had much in common. Later, however, when the first American Prix de Rome in literature was to be awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Kerouac and I were apparently the leading contenders, each with his particular champion in the Academy. In my case it was Allen Tate, in Jack’s it was Mark Van Doren. The committee finally settled on me as the recipient, and when Jack learned (that very evening, very likely) how the vote went, he called my parents’ home to congratulate me. That was a noble and generous thing to do. I was abroad at the time, but he was, my parents wrote me, genial and sincere and a little high.

INTERVIEWER

So your manner of speech goes back to school days?

HECHT

At the very least. And I’m the more convinced that it served as a mask because in the old days, when I used to drink a lot, everyone remarked that my speech became more precise and fastidious the more I drank. I used to be pleased by this observation. I suppose I felt it meant I was giving nothing away.

INTERVIEWER

Did you ever, back when, say to yourself: A poet—that’s what I want to be?

HECHT

Oh, I said that quite early. I think I fell in love with poetry in my freshman year in college. My father was a businessman, and I knew I didn’t want to be that, not because I knew anything about business, or his life—except that it had been miserable—but I was not in love with business, and I was with poetry. So I said, one weekend when I came home from school, that I was going to be a poet. It was an act of defiance, but I didn’t think it would be taken very seriously. I thought they’d just humor me and say, By the time he grows up he’ll change his mind, and so forth. But they were really terrified. So terrified that they decided they would persuade me to change my mind, and do so at once. They enlisted the help of Dr. Seuss, Theodore Geisel, who was a friend of theirs. He was invited to dinner the next time I came home from college. He lived in New York then, and was making political cartoons for PM, the newspaper, and also doing Quick, Henry, the Flit ads. He came to dinner, and I had no reason to suspect he was there for any sinister purpose until, at the end of dinner, we rose to leave the dining room and Ted put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Tony, what do you want to be when you grow up?” And I knew right away that something was up. So I said, “I’m going to be a poet.” And he said, “Fine, and I have some advice for you. I think the first thing you should do is to read the life of Joseph Pulitzer.” Well, I didn’t know anything about Pulitzer except that he was a newspaper publisher. But I knew instantly that Ted was trying to discourage me from becoming a poet, so I assumed there must be something in Pulitzer’s life that was as threatening as it could possibly be. Whereupon I resolved never to read the life of Joseph Pulitzer, and I never have.

INTERVIEWER

Was it in college, then, that you began writing poems?

HECHT

God knows when it all began, but long before then. The first thing for which I felt I had any natural aptitude was music. I had a quite good ear (not perfect but relative pitch), and a quite good auditory memory. I was able to recall a good deal of intricate classical music after a single hearing, and to pick out fugues and canons by ear on the piano.

INTERVIEWER

Was this a help to you as a poet?

HECHT

I thought so at the time I first began to write, though I am no longer so sure. At the very least, however, it gave me a strong sense of form. But as far as I can recall, the first things I wrote were doggerel verse.

INTERVIEWER

What prompted that? Surely not Bach or Mozart?

HECHT

No. I found that I had committed to memory not only a lot of classical music but the tunes and words of songs by Cole Porter and Noel Coward; and I greatly enjoyed the highly formal patterns of those lyrics, as well, of course, as their wit and charm. In fact, the wit and charm seemed to have a lot to do with the formal patterns.

INTERVIEWER

Did you try to compose songs yourself?

HECHT

No, not really. I never supposed I had any creative gifts as regards music; only that I was keenly attentive to it. But I found that I could also recall words if they appeared in a patterned order, and my interest in poems began there.

INTERVIEWER

What was it that diverted you, if that’s the right word, into “serious” poetry?

HECHT

Well, of course I knew that it existed. I was forced to read a great deal of it at school. Being afflicted with the particular kind of auditory memory that I have, I still retain ineradicably, to this day, long passages of Whittier’s “Snow-Bound” and Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” which I was required to memorize at school. I often wished that it had been Milton and Shakespeare rather than Whittier and Bryant that had been so permanently lodged in my head. But when, in due course, I came to try to write poems in iambic pentameter, my yardstick for measuring the length of line in my own ear was the first line of “Thanatopsis”: “To him who in the love of Nature holds . . .” I would measure out my own lines against that one, not because I liked it especially, but because it was a certified, Bureau of Weights and Measures Standard Iambic Pentameter Line.