Selected Poems
Anthony Hecht
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
<p>Alongside Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, and other pillars of twentieth-century poetry, Anthony Hecht joins the Borzoi Poetry series.<br><br>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 be captivated by Hecht's dark music and allusions to the literature of the past. As J. D. McClatchy explains in his introduction, Hecht was a poet for whom formal elegance was inextricably bound up with the dramatic force, thematic ambition, and powerful emotions in each poem. The rules of his art, which he both honored and transformed, are "moral principles meant finally to reveal the structure of human dilemmas and sympathies."<br><br>This elevated sense of what poetry can accomplish...</br></br></br></br></p>