Review: Glyn Maxwell on Anthony Hecht

Critic Theodor Adorno didn’t say “no poetry after Auschwitz,” as the quote often has it. He said to write poems after Auschwitz “is barbaric,” but later retracted that, saying “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream.” In the days when I believed he said “no poetry after Auschwitz” I privately recast it as “only poetry after Auschwitz,” meaning poetry would never matter again if it tried to float free of what happened.

Anthony Hecht couldn’t do that. He was there with the liberating US Army at Flossenbürg in 1945. He learned of unimaginable Nazi barbarity in testimonies he transcribed, later used as evidence in war crimes trials at Dachau. He also saw surrendering German families gunned down by his own unit. His wartime experiences, recounted by David Yezzi in a superb new biography, bloom shockingly in a handful of poems. To read his work in full is to see a faint, familiar image of the poet—a clubbable bow-tied Shakespearean, the fellow of Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, the jealous admirer of Auden—dissolve into a wraithlike presence whose great poems are few but as unforgettable as anything in twentieth-century poetry.

The familiar image, the life-mask, is the genial, sad-eyed face of the man who would say near death, adapting Keats, “I pray I shall be among the English poets.” Hecht prayed for that his whole life, to follow in canonical footprints, join the club, be garlanded with chairs and prizes. And he was. But the prayer feels like a wish to not have seen, to have lived in a world that hadn’t gone through what, for a gaping nightmare instant, Hecht himself saw right up close.

He had defenses that, fortunately for him and near-fatally for his work, held fast. He emerged from “a rather bitter and lonely” childhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, soured with indifference at home and antisemitism at school; he served in the army—boredom briefly shot through with horror—drank heavily in the aftermath, did months in an asylum, ended up among professors at Kenyon, joining a coterie that had formed around Ransom in the mid-forties. There, by his own account, Hecht “played … the role of the sedulous ape, to write in the manner of Eliot first, then Stevens, Yeats, Auden, Ransom, Richard Wilbur, Elizabeth Bishop. Each effaced the other, until I became a palimpsest with little bits of all of them.” For he does sense the problem, as in these anxious lines from his first book: “I have discouraged that in me / Wherewith I most advance: / Too easy eloquence of speech …” Wherewith is the tell, which I’m not sure he knows.