Anthony Hecht (1923- 2004) followed the G.I. bill to study with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon. He wrote eight books of poetry and two works of nonfiction, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection The Hard Hours in 1967. In his lifetime he also received the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Loines Award, the Librex-Guggenheim Eugenio Montale Award, and the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy in Rome, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lived in Washington, D.C.
Poetry
Autumn 1980
Poem without Anybody
in memory of James Wright Mid-ocean. Nightfall. No one. The sea spray Is lifted skyward out of a dark self As if ambitious to become air, and falls, A […]
Poetry
Spring 1947
To a Soldier Killed in Germany
On a small town, twitching with life and death, The sun pours his consuming acid down On broken monuments, the shattered fist Of Hitler’s figure, stoney carrion kissed By the […]
Poetry
Winter 1979
The Deodand
What are these women up to? They’ve gone and strung Drapes over the windows, cutting out light And the slightest hope of a breeze here in mid-August. Can this be […]
Poetry
Spring 1947
Once Removed
I saw a piece of the hard-earned earth, a piece of the worldWhere the wind fell down on rocks, and a hundred sticksWere all the forest it had, and the […]
Poetry
Autumn/ September 1966
“It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It”
Tonight my children hunch Toward their Western, and are glad As, with a Sunday punch, The Good casts out the Bad. And in their fairy tales The warty giant and […]
Poetry
Winter 1954
Upon the Death of George Santayana
Down every passage of the cloister hung A dark wood cross on a white plaster wall; But in the court were roses, not as tongue Would have them (something of […]
Poetry
Spring 1953
The Gardens of the Villa D’Este
This is Italian. Here Is cause for the undiminished bounce Of sex, cause for the lark, the animal spirit To rise, aerated, but not beyond our reach, to spread Friction […]
Poetry
Spring 1952
The Song of the Beasts
(According to ancient Roman law, a man convicted of parricide was condemned to be flogged, and then sewn in a sack with a cock, a viper, a dog and an […]
Poetry
Spring 1952
Elegy
(FROM THE GERMAN OF WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE) Woe to thee, Year, and hast thou so silent got thee forth? Hath Life a blood securely, or dreamed I at the […]
Poetry
Autumn 1951
Aubade
Morning has come at last. The rational light Discovers even the humblest thing that yearns For heaven; from its scaled and shadeless height, Figures its difficult way among the ferns, […]
Poetry
Autumn 1950
Springtime
(from the French of Charles d’Orléans) The Weather hath put off his mien Of tearing winde and cold advance, And sporteth new an elegance Yellow of sun and spritely greene. […]
Poetry
Autumn 1950
Halloween
Tonight our streets are filled With beardless pirates and their high-heeled wives Who own no maps of treasure and have killed Nobody with their aimless wooden knives; They cry us […]
Poetry
Autumn 1948
The Private Eye: A Detective Story
The laundry man fermented in his bed, Indifferent to complaints about the towels And undershirts: he had been three days dead, Creatures had come to forage in his bowels. Tell […]
Poetry
Autumn 1948
Fugue for One Voice
There are some people who believe that fish Drown in the air; our element is so thin It can't sustain the flourish of those gills. This atmosphere, which is our […]
Poetry
Autumn 1947
Dream
Saliva swims around the empty tooth Of an old man, sleeping within the park. Between the bushes, Evening slips along, Trailing a violet and orange song, And followed closely by […]
Poetry
Autumn 1947
Wind of Spain
Down from the hills the wind came striding and striding, And it was cool as the dark coral hermitage of fish Where it rinsed the boughs of the olive trees […]
Halloween
From the Kenyon Review, Autumn 1950, Vol. XII, No. 4 Tonight our streets are filled With beardless pirates and their high-heeled wives Who own no maps of treasure and have […]