Anthony Hecht [is] one of the most maddeningly unprolific of contemporary poets. I recall the excitement of discovering, in The Hard Hours (1968), a manner clear but not shrill, urbane without shallowness, erudite without undue solemnity, and commendably lacking in that stylistic fuss and muddle which suggest an embarrassed backward glance by so many American writers towards some notional European tradition. Knowing his way around the literature of classical antiquity seems also to have helped….

His visual effects have an unembarrassed sensuality in their grasp of surface and texture, curiously at odds with similar elements in much recent English verse, where such things tend to be regarded almost as sybaritic accretions….

The title poem [of The Venetian Vespers] ought to encourage anyone who, like me, has been deploring the stunted growths, severely limited vistas and chilly parochialities of poetry during the past decade. Here at last are scope, amplitude and long perspectives, in a work whose governing style is one of relaxed self-assurance. It is not, thank heavens, wholly about Venice, whose role as a monstrous cliché of European cultural experience is so often lethal to common sense. Yet the inclusion of witty and acutely-observed autobiographical fragments among bravura descriptions of canals, frescoes and mosaics gives the writing a many-layered, haphazard brilliance and variety oddly comparable to its subject. The poem becomes the city, and Hecht joins Byron, Musset and Baron Corvo in the small band of those who can write of La Serenissima without grovelling, vulgarity or obtuseness.