Anthony Hecht

Anthony Evan Hecht (January 16, 1923 – October 20, 2004) was an American poet.

Anthony Evan Hecht
Anthony Hecht at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1947
Born	(1923-01-16)January 16, 1923 New York, NY
Died	October 20, 2004(2004-10-20) (aged 81)
Occupation	Poet, critic, teacher
Language	English
Education	Bard College, Kenyon College
Period	20th century
Genre	Poetry
Literary movement	Formalism
Years active	1950-2004

Hecht was born in New York City. His parents were a Jewish middle-class businessman and homemaker. He decided to become a poet when he was 17.^[1] He was a student at Bard College for three years before he was drafted into the U. S. Army. In 1945, when he was 22, his army group freed Flossenburg concentration camp. What he saw there had a large effect on his poetry.^[2]

After the war, in 1947 and 1948, he studied at Kenyon College. One of his teachers was poet John Crowe Ransom. He wrote his first book, A Summoning of Stones, in Rome in 1951.^[2] He was known as a "formalist" poet. He cared a lot about the traditional shapes and sounds of poetry.^[3]

Hecht's book The Hard Hours won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1968.^[4] From 1982 to 1984 he was the U. S. Consultant in Poetry (Poet Laureate). He taught at the University of Rochester from 1967-1985.5^[5]

Hecht died of lymphoma in Washington, D. C. in 2004.^[1]

Books

Poetry

• A Summoning of Stones (1954)
• The Hard Hours (1967)
• Millions of Strange Shadows (1977)
• The Venetian Vespers (1979)
• The Transparent Man (1990)
• Collected Earlier Poems (1990)
• Flight Among the Tombs (1998)
• The Darkness and the Light (2001)
• Collected Later Poems (2003)

Translations

• Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes (1973)

Other Works

• Obbligati: Essays in Criticism (1986)
• The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden (1993)
• On the Laws of the Poetic Art (1995)
• Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry (2003)

Related pages

• List of poets from North America