Anthony Hecht American Literature Analysis
The bulk of Anthony Hecht’s oeuvre is an album of the agony of visions revisited. His parodies aside, much of Hecht’s poetry speaks to matters he found most important: seeing and seeing accurately, remembering, and reconciling by way of relentless effort and painstaking technique. He once said that seeing accurately is almost the most important act that a human being can perform in life. This act is one he perfected as a formalist, or New Critical poet, one that maintained the ethos of an era, and one that Hecht made memorable both by virtue of form and by content.
As did Ezra Pound, Hecht saw poetry as the insignia of civilization, and he took responsibility as a poet whose task it was not only to write about himself or further his practice of poetic expression, but also to apply prosodic skill to life by putting it into context without evading the terrible. A seemingly impossible task, Hecht accomplished it by taking an almost impossible approach, by writing in a poetic form that many say is almost impossible to write: the sestina.
Hecht approached this daunting, demanding task with the belief that it is possible to have some sort of reconciliation—to present that which is disagreeable by putting it into the context of beauty and truth, the way, he once noted, that John Keats found William Shakespeare was able to do. The sestina provided the form for Hecht to combine, contrast, and reconcile several ideas at once. Ideas that bombard and overwhelm the human senses and sensibilities in an overwhelming manner require ordering. Grotesque incidents that compound and intensify in the human mind by way of human recall require reckoning. As a witness to and a recorder of the horrors of the Holocaust and with the haunting of the memories of this experience that found him bolting awake shrieking for decades after, Hecht was compelled to use a form of expression that would depict the cognitive dissonance and the visceral devastation of such atrocities—a form that would make sense of it by encapsulating the randomness, the chaos, and the complexity of Holocaust images from which he was never able to shake free.
The sestina is a difficult and demanding form composed of six six-line stanzas and a concluding three line envoi that, in exchange for traditional rhyming, uses a fixed pattern of six end words, all of which must be used once in each stanza (in a predetermined order) and once again in the last three lines of the envoi. By employing this form, Hecht could depict randomness and incomprehensible atrocity, combining and contrasting—by balancing in the tight and formal architecture of the sestina—several opposing ideas and images in an oxymoronic, paradoxical composite of things that do not normally belong together, ultimately allowing for an uncanny coalescence.
In “The Book of Yolek,” for example, the sestina’s six end words, “meal,” “walk,” “camp,” “home,” “to,” and “day,” fix the grossly contrasting constructs of any boy, any child, any person eating, strolling, attending summer camp, and living any day with the representative Warsaw ghetto orphan, Yolek, who is forced to walk to an extermination slave-labor camp, where his meals are less aesthetic indulgences and more savage scrapping for crumbs of survival, and where his day is the antithesis of a child’s typical day.
In such works (again, excluding here a focus on his playful parodies, his elegant ekphrastic poetry, his learned literary criticism, and his playful and dabbling double dactyls), Hecht choreographs combinations of opposite concepts—the ugly and the beautiful, the private and public worlds, battle and passivity. He also orchestrates by juxtaposing...
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images—darkness and light, remembering and forgetting, symbols of good and symbols of evil—and conducts complex antithetical linguistic abstractions in phrases such as “calm suspension,” or “strange quietness,” and in lines such as “sharks in the nurseries, eels on the floors.” He accomplishes, then, an existential equalizing of opposites, a bastardizing marriage of logical to physical, psychological to metaphysical—so the human mind, once in moral orientation and now unraveled by the tragic, the grotesque, the unforgivable, the unthinkable, can accommodate to some degree of comprehension and can find some kind of reconciliation.
Hecht achieves this by way of sophisticated themes, most significantly, of memory and vision, of the obsessive imperative that is recall, and of evil and memory of evil, For instance, upending and displacing images of a childhood memory and the memory of a historical soldier, “A Hill” is imbued with the theme of recall as its primary driving force. In “The Book of Yolek,” for example, readers are both confronted with the insistent eternal recurrence of remembering and admonished to never forget at the same time they are reminded that they will forget and should forever be inescapably tethered—every time one eats, walks, moves, or takes a summer reprieve in a lakeside summer camp.
Hecht used the stunning literary devices of metonymy, biblical and literary allusion, and a uniquely musical affect by way of affecting voice and word choice, combined with the relentless moral implications of memory and the evil that incited it. In doing so, he exercised the poetic vision he insisted was necessary for all good poets, despite the fact that he claimed his postwar reading made him unable to later separate his anger and revulsion at what he actually saw from what he later came to learn.
“A Hill”
First published: 1967 (collected in Collected Earlier Poems, 1990)
Type of work: Poem
“A Hill” uses the comparative study of juxtaposed memories and visionary depictions of physical and metaphysical settings.
“A Hill” opens with a vision, described in a tone of disgust for what appears—through contrasting images and language—as a gaudy European garage sale, with its “cheap landscapes” and “ugly religion”—a spiteful mercantile Italy. The scene is then turned over, upended, as it is again later, and done without textual representation. That is, there is no break in the lines when the shift of memory occurs, which creates a seamless transition and simultaneous blending of the former, a place whose “noises suddenly stopped,” with the suddenness of a “cold, close to freezing” boyhood hill in Poughkeepsie. As Hecht later confirmed, landscape in “A Hill” (and other works) is an expression of the desolation of soul, the bleakness, the forlornness, assembling and conveying deep despair.
“More Light! More Light!”
First published: 1967 (collected in TheHard Hours, 1967)
Type of work: Poem
“More Light! More Light!” serves as a focused, dramatic representation of dignity and the absence of dignity in appalling executions of two different eras.
“More Light! More Light!”—the title alluding to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s dying words—conveys the pervasiveness of the manipulation of dignity. As well as employing the device of light as symbol, the piece is a profoundly evocative juxtaposition and subsequent reconciliation of similar images and acts, which depart when the execution of the martyr of the Middle Ages becomes, in the twentieth century, a Nazi command of a Polish man to execute others by burying them alive and then to execute himself by climbing in with them. In order to show the absurdity and evil in the issue of the command, Hecht uses a passive voice, allusion, and a signature metonymy, upon which the poem pivots. Power, force, brutality, torture—all that is the Holocaust—are represented, depicted, and defined by the Luger in the gloved hand, which is “settled back deeply in its glove” and “hover(s) lightly in its glove.” In the end, it is the foreshadowing objective correlative, the symbol of Nazi megalomania, and the reminder of a historical threat to dignity (a dignity that is denied to the martyr) that causes the death of the Polish man.
“The Deodand”
First published: 1980 (collected in Collected Earlier Poems, 1990)
Type of work: Poem
“The Deodand” uses the hideous composite of ekphrastic imagery and opposing martyrdom imagery.
“The Deodand” furthers what Hecht once confirmed as a strange fascination with stories and paintings of Christian martyrdom, which, he noted, could be understood in two different ways. The paradox of comprehending and expressing sacrifice, combined with ekphrasis (poetry concerned with highly visual scenes) and historical narrative, is the featured function of “The Deodand.” The first half of the sestina depicts the “swooning lubricities and lassitudes” of the subjects of a Eugène Delacroix or Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painting—who pose as femmesdelanuit (ladies of the night), or harem girls—starkly contrasted with the sestina’s latter half of a young French legionnaire who is forced to dress in the clothes of a woman and made to beg for food. The juxtaposition is classic, signature Hecht, who deftly reconciles and coalesces the opposing forces and acts of [in]humanity.
“The Book of Yolek”
First published: 1990 (collected in Collected Later Poems, 2003)
Type of work: Poem
“The Book of Yolek” serves as a clutching call to accommodate the memory of the Holocaust’s most vulnerable victims: the children.
As with most of Hecht’s sestinas, “The Book of Yolek” carries the biographical burden of eternal recurrence—of human indignities, of the void of human indemnity, and of the onus of seeing and remembering. However, unlike other works recovering the memories of the Holocaust, this work admonishes, expecting and insisting—with precision of end word usage and textured, terrifying allusion—that every sentient being also carry the burden and also remember. It is not, then, pure memory that drives the work but a call to remember and in that relentless recall, to suspend that which saves humanity—be it food, water, walking, or joy.
