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Anthony Evan Hecht (January 16, 1923 – October 20, 2004) was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the Second World War, in which he fought, and the Holocaust being recurrent themes in his work.
In 1944, upon completing his final year at Bard, Hecht was drafted into the 97th Infantry Division and was sent to the battlefields in Europe.Jonathan Post, The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht, The Johns Hopkins University Press; Nov 27, 2012. He saw combat in Germany in the "Ruhr Pocket" and in Cheb in Czechoslovakia. However, his most significant experience occurred on April 23, 1945, when Hecht's division helped liberate Flossenbürg concentration camp. Hecht was ordered to interview French prisoners in the hope of gathering evidence on the camp's commanders. Years later, Hecht said of this experience, "The place, the suffering, the prisoners' accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking."
In spring, 1947, he taught at Kenyon. His first poems, "Once Removed" and "To a Soldier Killed in Germany", were published in The Kenyon Review. Later that year, he suffered a nervous breakdown and returned to his parents' home in New York City and entered psychoanalysis. In 1948, his poems began to appear in The Hudson Review, Poetry, and Furioso. He later won the Furioso Poetry Award and enrolled at Columbia University as a candidate for a master's degree in English literature. Anthony Hecht, Selected Poems. Borzoi poetry, J. D. McClatchy, ed. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
Hecht released his first collection, A Summoning of Stones, in 1954. Even at this stage Hecht's poetry was often compared with that of W. H. Auden, with whom Hecht had become friends in 1951 during a holiday on the Italian island of Ischia, where Auden spent each summer. In 1993 Hecht published The Hidden Law, a critical reading of Auden's body of work. In his second book, The Hard Hours, Hecht first addressed his own experiences of World War II – memories that had caused him to have a nervous breakdown in 1959. Philip Hoy, Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy. London: Between the Lines, 2004. Hecht spent three months in hospital following his breakdown, although he was spared electric shock therapy, unlike Sylvia Plath, whom he had encountered while teaching at Smith College.
Hecht's main source of income was as a teacher of poetry, most notably at the University of Rochester, where he taught from 1967 to 1985. He also spent varying lengths of time teaching at other notable institutions such as Smith, Bard, Harvard, Georgetown, and Yale University. Between 1982 and 1984, he held the esteemed position of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Hecht won a number of literary awards including: the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for The Hard Hours), the 1983 Bollingen Prize, the 1988 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 1989 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the 1997 Wallace Stevens Award, the 1999/2000 Frost Medal, and the Tanning Prize.
Hecht died on October 20, 2004, at his home in Washington, D.C.; he is buried at the cemetery at Bard College. One month later, on November 17, Hecht was awarded the National Medal of Arts, accepted on his behalf by his wife, Helen Hecht. National Endowment for the Arts – 2004 National Medal of Arts
The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize is awarded annually by the Waywiser Press. The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize
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