The Poet Who Found His Metier

Pulitzer winner Anthony Hecht.

Anthony Hecht, who died Wednesday at the age of 81, was often described as courtly and elegant, both in his person and his poetry.

He wore beautifully cut suits, spoke with meticulous precision and practiced the gentlemanly manners of a better age than ours. He could quote Shakespeare at will -- and W.H. Auden (about whom he wrote a superb study), and Elizabeth Bishop, and George Herbert, or virtually any poet of merit in English. He also greatly enjoyed wit and literary gossip, and at his lively Washington dinner parties, presided over by his beloved wife, Helen, one might find distinguished classicists, famous writers and critics, noted scholars and mere journalists. Tony Hecht possessed not only a gift for poetry but also an equal one for friendship.

He seems to have known everyone in the literary world. During conversations -- we met in 1982, shortly after he became the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress -- I learned that he had been in school with Jack Kerouac, been friends with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, studied with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon. As the years passed, he would frequently send me meticulously typed notes about my weekly reviews in Book World, praising some but even more often gently pointing to factual errors or mistakes in judgment. Anthony Hecht believed in criticism as the correction of taste, and he helped correct mine.

That generosity of spirit can be found in all his writing. Much of his oeuvre -- and the old word seems right in his case -- takes the form of homage. He translated Aeschylus, Horace, Goethe and Baudelaire, composed elegies for departed friends such as the poets James Merrill and Joseph Brodsky, and regularly evoked in verse the sensual heat and beauty of the Italy he visited throughout his life:

This is Italian. Here

Is cause for the undiminished bounce

Of sex, cause for the lark, the animal spirit

To rise, aerated, but not beyond our reach, to spread

Friction upon the air, cause to sing loud for the bed

Of jonquils, the linen bed, and established merit

Of love, and grandly to pronounce

Pleasure without peer.

-- From "The Gardens

of the Villa d'Este"