Collected Poems of Anthony Hecht: Including Late and Uncollected Work

The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • In his centenary year, this volume of the Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate’s poems celebrates the indispensable artistry of a writer who faced the history of his era with a “clear-eyed mercy toward human weakness” (The New York Times Book Review) and was hailed in his day as “the best poet writing in English” (Joseph Brodsky).

This volume brings together for the first time all of the poems that appeared in Anthony Hecht’s seven trade collections, from A Summoning of Stones of 1954 through to The Darkness and the Light of 2001; it adds the remarkable work contained in his posthumously issued Interior Skies: Late Poems from Liguria of 2011; and it rounds this out with the best of the many poems which were left uncollected at the time of his death in 2004, the earliest dating from 1950 and the latest from 2001. Including the woodcuts by Leonard Baskin that accompanied some of his pieces through the years, Collected Poems brings us the full sweep of the experience and artistry of Anthony Hecht, who, as an infantryman in World War II, bore witness to the shaping events of his time, which continue to shape our own.

As the editor Philip Hoy states in his introduction: “Anthony Hecht once wrote that poems can allow us to contemplate our ‘sweetest triumphs’ and our ‘deepest desolations,’ and by employing ‘the manifold devices of art’ to recover for us what he memorably called ‘the inexhaustible plenitude of the world.’ The work gathered together here amply attests to the truth of that claim, and makes it clear that Hecht was one of the finest poets, not just of his generation, but of the twentieth century.”

ANTHONY HECHT, born in New York City in 1923, was the author of eight books of poetry, including The Hard Hours, which received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968. He also wrote several volumes of essays and criticism, among them The Hidden Law, a book-length study of the poetry of W. H. Auden. Appointed poet laureate of the United States in 1982, his other honors included the Ruth B. Lilly Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Eugenio Montale Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the National Medal of Arts. He received fellowships from the American Academy in Rome; the Bogliasco, Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundations; and the National Endowment for the Arts. A member of the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he died in 2004.

PHILIP HOY is editor in chief of the Waywiser Press, which became Anthony Hecht’s British publisher in 2002. He is the author of W. D. Snodgrass in Conversation with Philip Hoy (1998), Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy (1999), Donald Justice in Conversation with Philip Hoy (2001), and M. Degas Steps Out: An Essay (2022). He wrote the foreword to Hecht’s posthumously published Interior Skies: Late Poems from Liguria (2011) and is the editor of A Bountiful Harvest: The Correspondence of Anthony Hecht and William L. MacDonald (2018).