Late Romance
Anthony Hecht—A Poet's Life
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) was one of America’s greatest poets, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and widely recognized as a master of formal verse that drew on wide-ranging cultural and literary sources, as well as Hecht’s experiences as a soldier during World War II, during which he fought in Germany and Czechoslovakia and helped to liberate the Flossenburg concentration camp.
In Late Romance, David Yezzi—himself a renowned poet and critic—reveals the depths that informed the meticulous surfaces of Hecht’s poems. Born to a wealthy German-Jewish family in Manhattan, Hecht saw his father lose nearly everything during the stock market crash of 1929. He grew into an accomplished athlete, actor, writer, and eventually a soldier in the crucible that consumed the world. Returning from the war, Hecht struggled to reconcile what he had witnessed and experienced, suffering from mental illness that required hospitalization. But he found the means to channel his emotions into poetry of lasting meaning, control, and depth; along with Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Theodore Roethke, and Elizabeth Bishop, Hecht remains a vital presence in letters.
Published to celebrate the 100th year of his birth, and to coincide with an edition of his collected poems (to be published by Knopf), Late Romance is the definitive, dramatic biography of a uniquely-gifted writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yezzi (More Things in Heaven) delivers an affectionate and meticulous biography of fellow poet Anthony Hecht (1923–2004). Beginning with Hecht's childhood in a wealthy German Jewish enclave on New York's Upper East Side, Yezzi details his subject's formative years as a budding poet at Bard College and the horrors he witnessed fighting in WWII, including when he took part in the liberation of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Tracing the development of Hecht's style, Yezzi explains that during Hecht's studies as a non-matriculating "special student" at Kenyon College after the war, he adopted mentor John Crowe Ransom's "Eliotic impersonality," which sought to disguise autobiographical elements and consider them as if at a remove. The period from 1967 to 1971 was transformative for Hecht, Yezzi suggests, describing how during that time Hecht won the Pulitzer Prize for The Hard Hours, which "bolstered his reputation and career," and married his former student, Helen D'Alessandro, a book editor who offered him reprieve from his "periods of melancholy." Yezzi provides astute analysis of how Hecht's life influenced his poetry—noting that "Aubade," one of his last poems, was inspired by his contemplation of "the anguish his death would cause" Helen—and the careful research, drawn from Hecht's archives and letters and interviews with his friends, brings the poet to vivid life. This will stand as the definitive account of an influential American poet.
