About Anthony Hecht
Anthony Hecht (16 january 1923 – 20 october 2004) was an American poet and scholar. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the Second World War, in which he fought, and the Holocaust being recurrent themes in his work. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1968 for The Hard Hours.Born in New York City and educated at Bard College and Columbia, Hecht served in Europe and Japan in the U.S. Army. He taught for a number of years at the University of Rochester. Hecht has written several books of criticism, including a study of W. H. Auden, and translated both classical and contemporary writers. Often learned and witty in his poetry, he has occasionally taken up difficult subjects, as with the Holocaust poem, “More Light! More Light!”.
Hecht published his first collection, A Summoning of Stones, in 1954. Even then, Hecht's poetry was often compared to that of Auden, with whom he had become friends in 1951 during a vacation on the Italian island of Ischia, where Auden spent each summer. In 1993 Hecht published The Hidden Law, a critical reading of Auden's writings. In his second book, The Hard Hours, Hecht conveys for the first time his own experience of World War II, the memory of which caused him to suffer a mental breakdown in 1959. Hecht spent three months in the hospital following his breakdown, however, he was spared electric shock therapy, unlike Sylvia Plath, whom he had met while teaching at Smith College.
Between 1982 and 1984, he held the position of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Hecht won numerous literary awards, including the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Hard Hours, the 1983 Bollingen Prize, the 1988 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 1989 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the 1997 Academy of American Poets Prize, and the 1999/2000 Robert Frost Medal.
Browse all poems and texts published on Anthony Hecht
The Anthony Hecht prize is awarded annually by the Waywiser press.
