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 volume—the first selected poems to be made from Hecht’s seven individual volumes—will...

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 po...

Anthony Hecht, now in his eightieth year, has earned a place alongside such poets as W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop. Here under one cover are his three most recent collections–The Transparent Man, Flight Among the Tombs, and The Darkness and the Light. The perfect companion to his Collected Earlier Poems (continuously in print since 1990), this book brings the eloquent sound of Hecht’s music to bear on a wide variety of human dramas: from a young...

Spanning seven decades, these often intimate, brilliantly astute letters by the eminent poet Anthony Hecht reflect a body of work that influenced the history of twentieth-century American poetry.Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anthony Hecht (1923–2004) was known not only for his masterful control of form and language but also for his wit and humor.With the help of Helen Hecht, the poet’s widow, Jonathan F. S. Post combed through more than 4,000 letters to produ...

THE VENETIAN VESPERS (1979)“In its clear-eyed mercy toward human weakness, Anthony Hecht’s poetry goes from strength to strength. The Venetian Vespers is at once an intense corroboration and an ample extension of his subtle, supple talents. Nothing humane is alien to him… There is a handful of short poems that are fostered alike by beauty and fear. But it is the four long poems that confirm Hecht as a poet of the widest apprehensions and comprehension, and this without the ...

Originally published in 2003. The fruit of a lifetime's reading and thinking about literature, its delights and its responsibilities, this book by acclaimed poet and critic Anthony Hecht explores the mysteries of poetry, offering profound insight into poetic form, meter, rhyme, and meaning. Ranging from Renaissance to contemporary poets, Hecht considers the work of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Noel; Housman, Hopkins, Eliot, and Auden; Frost, Bishop, and Wilbur; Amichai, Simic, and Heaney. Step...

The poetry of Anthony Hecht has been praised by Harold Bloom and Ted Hughes, among others, for its sure control of difficult material and its unique music and visual precision. This new volume is the fruit of a mellowing maturity that carries with it a smoky bitterness, a flavor of ancient and experienced wisdom, as in this stanza from “Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-seven”:A turn, a glide, a quarter-turn and bow,The stately dance advances; these are airsBo...

The formidable talents of Anthony Hecht, one of the most gifted of contemporary American poets, and Helen Bacon, a classical scholar, are here brought to bear on this vibrant translation of Aeschylus' much underrated tragedy The Seven Against Thebes. The third and only remaining play in a trilogy dealing with related events, The Seven Against Thebes tells the story of the Argive attempt to claim the Kingdom of Thebes, and of the deaths of the brothers Eteocles and Polynei...

A magisterial exploration of poetry’s place in the fine arts by one of the twentieth century's leading poetsIn this book, eminent poet Anthony Hecht explores the art of poetry and its relationship to the other fine arts. While the problems he treats entail both philosophic and theoretical discussion, he never allows abstract speculation to overshadow his delight in the written texts that he introduces, or in the specific examples of painting and music to which he r...

Divided into two parts, this new book contains a collaboration with the artist Leonard Baskin called "Presumptions of Death, " reproducing 22 masterly wood engravings and all of Hecht's other poems written since his last book, The Transparent Man.

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 po...

A major addition to the literature of poetry, Edward Hirsch’s sparkling new work is a compilation of forms, devices, groups, movements, isms, aesthetics, rhetorical terms, and folklore—a book that all readers, writers, teachers, and students of poetry will return to over and over.Hirsch has delved deeply into the poetic traditions of the world, returning with an inclusive, international compendium. Moving gracefully from the bards of ancient Greece to the revolutionaries of Latin A...