Title: "Laws That Stand for Other Laws": Anthony Hecht's Dramatic Strategy
Abstract: Three books released in the past few years - Anthony Hecht's Collected Earlier Poems, his Transparent and a collection of essays on his poetry, Burdens of Formality - have a striking photograph of on their dust jackets. He is looking into a mirror, and as we look over his fight shoulder, we see the reflection of his face. He is gazing not at himself (no narcissism here), but at us, his audience. mirror forms his and our frame, and once removed, the photograph flames the mirror. I have come the conclusion that the portrait is singularly appropriate, given the way we Anthony Hecht's poetry: the photographer Richard Avedon comments that in a posed photograph, isolated from their environment, people become symbolic of themselves.(1) This is the way we view Hecht, and this is the way he views himself. deliberate double frame, the reflected image, the consciousness of an audience in a moment of self-reflection: all are deeply characteristic of Hecht's work and endeavour. I say attend to his poetry deliberately, since read is too passive a word for the experience of encountering a volume of Hecht's work, especially if that volume is the Collected Earlier Poems. Perhaps more than any poet writing today, Anthony Hecht's verse is firmly rooted in drama, and that most active of art forms has had a profound effect on his writing and on our response his verse. It was not always so, however; his earliest volume, A Summoning of Stones, is distinguished by its deliberate stasis, by what Richard Howard calls moments recovered,...instances rescued from the flux of phenomena (Anthony Hecht 198). But with his second book, Hard Hours, fashions a poetic strategy and voice that is indebted the drama, and since that volume his attention the theatre is everywhere evident. When asked select a favorite poem from the past place beside one of his own in Howard's Preferences, chose a scene from King Lear. He has translated Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes, choruses from Oedipus at Colonos, and written essays on Othello, Merchant of Venice, and Tempest. His latest volume of poetry, Transparent contains a reconsideration of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which Lysander, Demetrius, Helena, and Hermia are given new speeches, as Auden's Sea and the Mirror comments on Tempest.(2) Some of the most remarkable of his later poems are dramatic monologues - The Venetian Vespers, The Grapes, The Transparent Man, and See Venice and Die - as he increasingly resorts dramatic forms explore themes he found could not he contained in the traditional lyric forms he was writing at the time. But I will argue that Hecht's interest in the drama is not simply a poet's attraction a sister art; he is drawn it because drama, especially tragic drama, presents through its action a Weltanschauung that he shares. Not that is a tragedian manque, but the influence of the drama on his work is comparable John Ashbery's interest in abstract expressionist painting, or Richard Howard's attraction photography in his Homage Nadar sequences. All three find in the other art form a mode of expression that corresponds their poetic endeavour - Ashbery looks for improvisational gestures subvert logic, Howard is concerned with the sells deliberate posturing, and is acutely aware of the tragic inevitability of fortune's reversal. It is the dramatic element of Hecht's poetry that I believe sets him apart from (and above) Richard Wilbur, whom he is often compared, usually Hecht's disadvantage. Wilbur's poems, with a few exceptions, remain static explorations of his theme, while goes beyond meditation engage process through drama. And it is precisely this engagement that accounts for the powerful effect of his poems. Of course, I am not the first observer note that Hecht's poems bear some resemblance drama. Over a quarter of a century ago Laurence Lieberman noted that Hecht's juxtaposition of scenes in poems like More Light! …
Publication Year: 1994
Publication Date: 1994-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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