
Collected Poems of Anthony Hecht
Including late and uncollected work
Random House Inc (Publisher)
Published on 7. November 2023
Book
Hardback
640 pages
978-0-593-31919-2 (ISBN)
Description
"In his centenary year, a collection of the Pulitzer Prize winner's poems celebrates the indispensable artistry of a writer who faced the history of his era with a 'clear-eyed mercy toward human weakness' (NYTBR) and 'absolute raw simplicity and directness' (Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate of England, 1984-1998). Anthony Hecht, whose output spanned eight volumes, beginning in 1954 with A Summoning of Stones, served as an infantryman in World War II and participated in the liberation of the death camps in Germany. His aesthetic--bound up with a need to see the best and worst of humankind with unsparing clarity--was shaped by the cadences of the King James Bible and great literature of the past. From the seven deadly sins to a Manhattan scene of Third Avenue in sunlight, or his poems of the many faces of Death ('Death the Oxford Don,' 'Death the Whore,' 'Death the Film Director'), Hecht's subject matter called him to a formal elegance inextricably woven with the dramatic force, thematic ambition, and powerful emotions in each poem. As the late J. D. McClatchy wrote, the rules of Anthony Hecht's art were 'moral principles meant finally to reveal the structure of human dilemmas and sympathies'"
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
Random House USA Inc
Illustrations
38 ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 164 mm
Thickness: 40 mm
Weight
968 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-593-31919-2 (9780593319192)
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E-Book
11/2023
Knopf
€9.99
Available for download
Persons
ANTHONY HECHT, born in New York City in 1923, was the author of eight books of poetry, including The Hard Hours, which received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968. He also wrote several volumes of essays and criticism, among them The Hidden Law, a book-length study of the poetry of W. H. Auden. Appointed poet laureate of the United States in 1982, his other honors included the Ruth B. Lilly Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Eugenio Montale Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the National Medal of Arts. He received fellowships from the American Academy in Rome; the Bogliasco, Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundations; and the National Endowment for the Arts. A member of the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he died in 2004.
PHILIP HOY is editor in chief of the Waywiser Press, which became Anthony Hecht’s British publisher in 2002. He is the author of W. D. Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip Hoy (1998), Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy (1999), Donald Justice in Conversation with Philip Hoy (2001), and M. Degas Steps Out: An Essay (2022). He wrote the foreword to Hecht’s posthumously published Interior Skies: Late Poems from Liguria (2011) and is the editor of A Bountiful Harvest: The Correspondence of Anthony Hecht and William L. MacDonald (2018).
PHILIP HOY is editor in chief of the Waywiser Press, which became Anthony Hecht’s British publisher in 2002. He is the author of W. D. Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip Hoy (1998), Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy (1999), Donald Justice in Conversation with Philip Hoy (2001), and M. Degas Steps Out: An Essay (2022). He wrote the foreword to Hecht’s posthumously published Interior Skies: Late Poems from Liguria (2011) and is the editor of A Bountiful Harvest: The Correspondence of Anthony Hecht and William L. MacDonald (2018).