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 on New Criterion: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/11/hieratic-hecht