Madness, Death, and Chaos in the Poems of Anthony Hecht

Oct. 20 2023

Although the poet Anthony Hecht never earned the fame of his friend and high-school classmate Jack Kerouac, he won a Pulitzer for his work in 1968, and was much admired in literary circles. Adam Kirsch reviews David Yezzi’s new biography:

For Hecht, madness wasn’t just a Shakespearean allusion, but an ever-present possibility, and his best poems rely on formal strictness to contain an intimate knowledge of chaos and evil.

Chaos was a familiar presence since childhood. Born in Manhattan in 1923 to an upper-middle-class German-Jewish family, Hecht had a privileged upbringing even after the Depression struck, complete with private schools and European tours. But his father, Melvyn, was a failure in business, losing much of the money his forebears had made in the leather trade, and the family’s downward mobility gave the young Hecht a basic sense of insecurity.

Hecht’s experience of combat [in World War II], was brief, but Yezzi convincingly shows that it affected the whole course of his later life and work. His unit landed in Europe in March 1945 and proceeded into Germany on April 7, just four weeks before V-E Day. . . . In late April Hecht’s division liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Flossenburg in Bavaria, where some 30,000 people had been killed and hundreds continued to die every day from typhus. He was assigned to interview the surviving inmates, collecting testimony that was later used in war-crimes trials.

Read more at New Criterion

More about: American Jewish literature, Holocaust, Poetry

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023