Anthony Hecht's Design
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing ANTHONY HECHT'S DESIGN BY PHOEBE ??TTI?G?LL Considering the earnest demeanor reviewers of verse tend to adopt, you might think we hoped to convince some hostile citizens'...
...As Hermia explains in the epilogue, The loves we have enacted, the sweet neumes And melodies played out in artful casts Of bated lines and characters, were not Mere casual musings of the rampant id...
...Hecht, however, could not easily be relegated to one side or the other...
...Similarly, the dying young woman in "The Transparent Man" perceives the bare autumn trees outside her hospital window as "magnificent enlargements" of thebrain's vascular system...
...Hecht moves us the way Shakespeare does: We are exalted by his powerful language and his ability to portray psychological depths...
...The poetry establishment then favored confessional statements expressed in loose, irregular Unes intended to suggest spontaneity...
...With John Hollander, he put together a collection of "double dactyls," a comic form funnier and more difficult than the limerick...
...The poet's sense of humor, moreover, has never quite appealed to "paleface" tastes...
...Now look at the following from "Terms" in Hecht's latest book: What do these distant thunderheads betide...
...The answer is that his formal prosody works as a hedge against the histrionic or bathetic excesses that so frequently mar verse dealing with emotionally charged material...
...Repulsive, yes, but Hecht brings it alive with a grandeur of description that evokes the sublime...
...the latter creates an assurance that separate parts somehow relate to each other, as well as to a controlling imagination...
...The poet imagines the sight (yet one more of his bleak landscapes): "Giant sea-worms bright with a glittering slime,/Crabs limping in their rheumatoid pavane...
...I see them there like huge discarnate minds, Lost in their meditative silences...
...This "emotion recollected in tranquillity" (as Wordsworth put it) arouses mixed reactions in the reader, who is swept into the drama...
...Imagine a stanza that opens with a sex murder, proceeds to reflect on universal guilt, and culminates in a description of wholesale massacre...
...Though Hecht cannot avert his gaze from suffering, he views it with outrage and compassion—never with cynicism, much less prurience...
...He not only employed rhyme and meter but actually revived some of the most difficult and elegant French and Italian verse forms...
...See Naples and Die" concludes with a reference to Pliny the Younger, who, during an eruption of Vesuvius and simultaneous earthquake that sucked all the water from the bay of Napoli, saw in the volcano's flaming light the "naked horrors" left exposed...
...A craving for design has traditionally been believed to be the impulse behind both love and the arts: The former inspires us with a sense of mission toward the beloved that gives meaning to our existence...
...The poetic heroes of the hour —Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, John Berryman—introduced themes and metaphors closely linked with psychotherapy: violent fantasies from the subconscious, the failure of people to interact successfully, the inhumanity of our century and the resulting prevalence of angst...
...The trunk, branches and twigs compose the vessels That feed and nourish vast immortal thoughts...
...The masque-like work tries to imitate the effect of music with words and ideas, in cascades of singing phrases and contrapuntal rhythms...
...Yet the world grown Wrathful, corrupt, once loosed a true floodtide That inched inside the wards where the frail are tied To their beds, invaded attics, climbed to disclose Sharks in the nurseries, eels on the floor to close Over lies and cries and herds, and on the tide, Which splintered barn, cottage and city pieceMeal, one sole family rode the world to peace...
...In fact, those poems often smacked of the"free association" Freudian analysts request of their patients...
...Auden, the subjects of The Hard Hours proved as gritty as any devotee of Confessional poetry could wish...
...Nothing to do with us...
...These projections of her own meditations on unanswerable questions—the significance of her short life, and the paradox of a disease whose overabundant growth kills the host that feeds it—haunts our imagination as surely as it does that of the failing speaker...
...Again, the result is not dispiriting, it is enlivening...
...Those who find Eliot or Allen Tate supercilious applaud him...
...Written by someone else, they might make for depressing reading...
...Writers & Writing ANTHONY HECHT'S DESIGN BY PHOEBE ??TTI?G?LL Considering the earnest demeanor reviewers of verse tend to adopt, you might think we hoped to convince some hostile citizens' watchdog organization that poems really do possess redeeming social value...
...If, to borrow Leslie Fiedler's clever analogy, American writing has always teetered between "palefaces" enamored of art's civilizing role, and "redmen" who relish the primitive and embrace the slogan "Make it new," then the '60s and '70s were definitely Custer's Last Stand for traditionalists...
...They exhibit a certain play, free, natural, Yet harmonious charmingly, as if our lives, As you would like to hope, had a design Not to be seen here in the thick of things...
...In four "movements, " Hermia and Lysander (first violin and viola), together with Helena and Demetrius (second violin and cello), take sexual love as their theme and develop variations on its shifting aspects...
...From the start, many of Hecht's poems told stories...
...Anthony Hecht's writing proves the point...
...The Transparent Man continues the fictive pattern in the title poem, a monologue by a woman dying of leukemia, and in "See Naples and Die, " the tale of a disintegrating marriage...
...A series of misunderstandings and misfortunes, trivial in themselves, breed a desolation of spirit that, the man feels, is echoed by the hideous landscape...
...The Naples poem consists of vignettes illustrating the growing estrangement of a husband and wife on vacation in southern Italy...
...With his acrid bawdiness and relish forbad puns, Hecht seems a long way from the dry wit of Modernism...
...Readers unfamiliar with Hecht may well be wondering what can possibly be so delightful about a poet whose themes gravitate to the horrific, the sordid, the graphic...
...He endeavors to "hear and recall the recurrent cries of pain/ And parse them into a discourse that consorts / In strange agreement" with the harmonies of poetry...
...Such a deluge of grim imagery cannot drown out the pleasure of unexpected but apposite associations...
...Previously, Hecht had parodied the Weltschmerz of Matthew Arnold ("The Dover Bitch") and composed comic ballads like "The Man who Married Magdalene" and "The Ghost in the Martini...
...Even when his words deny the possibility that we can decipher some meaning from the chaos in which we live, the measured lines promise us that there really is a pattern to it all...
...By his third book, The Venetian Vespers (1979), these had ripened into lengthy narratives...
...Whatever subjects may be treated or formal devices employed, such verse always gives pleasure...
...One, about a missionary who taught his native converts to play cricket, blossoms into a nonsense poem in the spirit (if not the style) of Edward Lear or W.S...
...This sestina variation derives much of its power from the cumulative repetitions of tide-tied / close-disclose / piece-peace, which swell to an intensity no paraphrase could possibly convey...
...Hecht's verse always conveys this overarching order...
...So I'm pleased that the appearance of his latest opus, The Transparent Man (Knopf, 75 pp., $18.95), together with the republication of his previous volumes in Collected Earlier Poems (Knopf, 272 pp., $22.95), affords an opportunity to celebrate the delights of his works...
...The Transparent Man also includes a jeu d'esprit entitled "Eclogue of the Shepherd and the Townie," as well asanumber of charming short pieces that are pure amusement...
...ALove for Four Voices: Homage to Franz Joseph Haydn" uses as principals the two pairs of lovers from ? Midsummer Night's Dream, identifying them with the "voices" of a string quartet...
...Critics were struck by the shocking atrocity stories: a Roman emperor flayed by barbarians, the burning of a martyr at the stake, Jews buried alive by a Slavic fellow-prisoner while their Nazi captors watched...
...Though Aristotle and our English teachers in college assured us that poetry's ultimate objective is to inspire pleasure, some postmodernist inhibition prevents us from showing enjoyment in our criticism...
...Gilbert...
...the John...
...Had he chosen, he could have very easily become a superb comic poet—a calling that requires the greatest craft and finesse...
...The failing is especially conspicuous, I have noticed, when we are discussing the lyrics of Anthony Hecht—one of the most appealing poets writing today...
...Hecht's longtime popularity is remarkable, given how unfashionable his style seemed in 1967 when his first major book, The Hard Hours, came out...
...Though his wizardry with sestinas, ballades and rime royal suggested a disciple of W.H...
...Not all of Hecht's poems dwell on somber motifs...
...Both poems plumb dark experiences...
...as they stand, that is far from the case...
...At a reading he gave in 1968 at Bennington College, I saw even that avant-garde community gasp slightly at the quatrain, "And you can get a blow-job/ Where other men have pissed / In the little room that's sacred / To the Evangelist" (i.e...
...Powerful poetry brings together a variety of disparate elements: the beauty of language used precisely, musicality of sound, and a quality of design that enlarges our ability to conceive of what our senses perceive...
...Not our disgrace That the raped corpse of a fourteen year-old, tied With friction tape, is found in a ditch, and a tide Of violent crime breaks out...
Vol. 73 • October 1990 • No. 13
