Selected Poems of Anthony Hecht

Alongside Wallace Stevens James Merrill and other pillars of twentieth-century poetry Anthony Hecht joins the Borzoi Poetry series.. Hecht whose writing rings with the cadences of the King James Bible and who as an infantryman at the end of World War II participated in the liberation of the concentration camps lived and experienced the best and worst of the twentieth century. Readers of this volumethe first selected poems to be made from Hechts seven individual volumeswill be captivated by Hechts dark music and allusions to the literature of the past. As J. D. McClatchy explains in his introduction Hecht was a poet for whom formal elegance was inextricably bound up with the dramatic force thematic ambition and powerful emotions in each poem. The rules of his art which he both honored and transformed are moral principles meant finally to reveal the structure of human dilemmas and sympathies.. This elevated sense of what poetry can accomplish defines our experience of reading Hecht and will ensure his place in the canon for years to come.. Adam and Eve knew such perfection onceGods finger in the cloud and on the groundNothing but springtime nothing else at all.But in our fallen state where the blood huntsFor blood and rises at the hunting soundWhat do we know of lasting since the fall?Who has not in the oil and heat of youthThought of the flourishing of the almond treeThe grasshopper and the failing of desireAnd thought his tongue might pierce the secrecyOf the six-pointed starlight and might choirA secret-voweled unutterable truth?from A Poem for Julia