Download or read book The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht written by Anthony Hecht and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 produce an intimate look into the poet’s mind and art across a lifetime. The letters range from Hecht’s early days at summer camp to college at Bard, to the front lines of World War II, to travels abroad in France and Italy, to marriage, and to fame as a poet and critic. Along the way, Hecht corresponded with well-known poets such as John Hollander, James Merrill, Anne Sexton, and Richard Wilbur. Those interested in the lives of contemporary poets will read these highly personal letters with delight and surprise.

Download or read book On the Laws of the Poetic Art written by Anthony Hecht and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magisterial exploration of poetry’s place in the fine arts by one of the twentieth century's leading poets In 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 refers. After discussing literature’s links with painting and music, Hecht investigates the theme of paradise and wilderness, especially in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He then turns to the question of public and private art, exploring the ways in which all the arts participate in balances between private and public modes of discourse, and between an exclusive or elitist role and the openly political. Beginning with a discussion of architecture as an illustration of a more general theme of discord and balance, the penultimate lecture probes the inner contradictions of works of art and our reactions to them, while the final piece concerns art and morality.

Download or read book Collected Later Poems of Anthony Hecht written by Anthony Hecht and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009-03-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 woman dying of leukemia to the tangled love affairs of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; from Death as the director of Hollywood films to the unexpected image of Marcel Proust as a figure skater. He glides with a gaining confidence, inscribes Tentative passages, thinks again, backtracks, Comes to a minute point, Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes, Large Palmer cursives and smooth entrelacs, Preoccupied, intent On a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant script Incised with twin steel blades and qualified Perfectly to express, With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly gripped Behind his back, attentively, clear-eyed, A glancing happiness.

Download or read book Selected Poems of Anthony Hecht written by Anthony Hecht and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 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.” This elevated sense of what poetry can accomplish defines our experience of reading Hecht, and will ensure his place in the canon for years to come. Adam and Eve knew such perfection once, God’s finger in the cloud, and on the ground Nothing but springtime, nothing else at all. But in our fallen state where the blood hunts For blood, and rises at the hunting sound, What do we know of lasting since the fall? Who has not, in the oil and heat of youth, Thought of the flourishing of the almond tree, The grasshopper, and the failing of desire, And thought his tongue might pierce the secrecy Of the six-pointed starlight, and might choir A secret-voweled, unutterable truth? —from “A Poem for Julia”

Download or read book Melodies Unheard written by Anthony Hecht and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-05-22 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these essays, acclaimed poet and critic Anthony Hecht explores the ways in which poetry can be read and the many pleasures it affords. Ranging from Shakespeare's sonnets to Eliot, Frost, and Simic, Melodies Unheard offers profound insight into poetic form, meter, rhyme, and meaning--into the mysteries of poetry itself. Anthony Hecht's vast knowledge of literature and his gift for mesmerizing argument are both amply present in Melodies Unheard. Whether defending the sestina against accusations of boredom and dolefulness or examining the structure of Shakespeare's sonnets or unraveling some of the complexity of Moby-Dick, these essays are models of civility, candor, and grace. I know of no other poet, certainly none of Anthony Hecht's stature, who sheds as much light on the intricacies and hidden designs of poems and who does it with such style.--Mark Strand Anthony Hecht declares himself 'a poet first and only secondarily a critic, ' but Melodies Unheard proves again that he is a master in both trades. His discourse on such subjects as rhyme, the sestina, and 'the music of forms' is both scholarly and delightful; his articles on individual poets are finely done; and best of al

Download or read book The Hard Hours written by Anthony Hecht and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Collected Earlier Poems written by Anthony Hecht and published by . This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Hecht has long been regarded as one of the great modern American poets, and is hailed by many as the unofficial Poet Laureate' of the USA. This volume brings together all the poems contained in The Hard Hours (1967), Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), and The Venetian Vespers (1980), and versions of Joseph Brodsky's early poems, which Hecht was the first to translate. These three distinguished books affirm Hecht's reputation as a technically accomplished poet capable of powerfully expressing deep sentiment and original thought.

Download or read book A Thickness of Particulars written by Jonathan F. S. Post and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht is the first book-length study of one of the great formal poets of the later twentieth century (1923-2004). Making use of Hecht's correspondence, which the author edited, it situates Hecht's writings in the context of pre- and post-World-War II verse, including poetry written by W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, and Richard Wilbur. In nine chapters, the book ranges over Hecht's full career, with special emphasis placed on the effects of the war on his memory; Hecht participated in the final push by the Allied troops in Europe and was involved in the liberation of the Flossenburg Concentration Camp. The study explores the important place Venice and Italy occupied in his imagination as well as the significance of the visual and dramatic arts and music more generally. Chapters are devoted to analyzing celebrated individual poems, such as "The Book of Yolek" and "The Venetian Vespers"; the making of particular volumes, as in the case of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning "The Hard Hours"; the poet's mid-career turn toward writing dramatic monologues and longer narrative poems ("Green, An Epistle," "The Grapes," and "See Naples and Die") and ekphrases; the inspiring use he made of Shakespeare, especially in "A Love for Four Voices," his delightful riff on "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; and his collaboration with the artist Leonard Baskin in the "Presumptions of Death" series from "Flight Among the Tombs." The book seeks to unfold the itinerary of a highly civilized mind brooding, with wit, over the dark landscape of the later twentieth century in poems of unrivalled beauty.

Download or read book The Incredible Sestina Anthology written by Daniel Nester and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2014-08-22 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than 800 years after its invention in medieval France, the sestina survives and thrives in English. A fixed 39-line poetic form with of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three- line stanza known as an envoi, tornada, or tercet, the sestina is the one form of poetry that poets from all camps agree can exist in a free verse world. Formalists and avant-gardes love sestinas for their ornate, maddeningly complicated rules of word repetition. For The Incredible Sestinas Anthology, editor Daniel Nester has gathered more than 100 writers—from John Ashbery to David Lehman to Matt Madden and Patricia Smith—to show the sestina in its many incarnations: prose and comic sestinas, collaborative and double sestinas, from masters of the form to brilliant one-off attempts, all to show its evolution and the possibilities of this dynamic form.

Download or read book Club Q written by DAVIS and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Winner of the 15th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, judged by Edward Hirsch. CLUB Q is a book of mid-American yearning for both exceptionalism and belonging. Beginning as a coming-out narrative, the poems track the story of a gay boy growing up in Colorado Springs, under the spectres of the U.S. military, megachurch Christianity, and chain-restaurant capitalism. As the speaker ages, he examines his complicity in his isolation and struggles to define community on his own terms. Through formal invention, high- and low-culture references, and deep wordplay, CLUB Q invites the reader to inhabit the precise imprecision of our human situation. "CLUB Q is an elegant, unsparing book of inquiry, where 'curiosity / is the recognition of ignorance / as a kind of sickness.' One eyebrow cocked, queer as fuck, James Davis lays bare our various longings to connect, and the attendant absurdity: men in a hotel room who 'shared a queen / and left no stain;' the internet that, 'like water, / transmits the smell of blood in all directions.' This droll and formally promiscuous poet lets 'desire // italicize our somberest sentiments.' It's hard not to love this nerdy, sexy, vulnerable first book."--Randall Mann "Reading James Davis' CLUB Q reminds me of slipping, long ago, into that mysterious Houston bar Marfreless (which literally possessed no address): once inside the utterly dark, soft ambiance, you felt your way through its space to settle onto the most forgiving of couches, down stiff drinks, luxuriate in the most animated and revealing of conversations. CLUB Q is one of the funniest and sharpest books of poems I've read in a long time. James Davis possesses a killer intellect, and his formal chops are bar none."--Cate Marvin "In this incredible debut, James Davis catalogs the excesses and deficits of American culture, from the schlock of millennial childhoods (Fruitopia! Alpha-Bits! Street Fighter II!) to the confounding terms of our present moment, in which 'creative is a noun.' These ingenious poems tackle sticky questions about family and class, and what it means to be 'queer / in a military town where cadets / count out football scores in pushups.' They also celebrate letters and words themselves--the sheer abundance of language and the worlds it makes possible. CLUB Q is funny and wise, and it blew me away."--Caki Wilkinson

Download or read book Wild Gratitude written by Edward Hirsch and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An excerpt from the poem, Wild Gratitude: "Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey, And put my fingers into her clean cat's mouth, And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens, And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air, And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight, I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart, Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing In everyone of the splintered London streets, And was locked away in the madhouse at St. Luke's With his sad religious mania, and his wild gratitude, And his grave prayers for the other lunatics, And his great love for his speckled cat, Jeoffry. All day today—August 13, 1983—I remembered how Christopher Smart blessed this same day in August, 1759, For its calm bravery and ordinary good conscience."

Download or read book Whitman Poems written by Walt Whitman and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 1994-10-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of forty-two Walt Whitman poems, including "Birds of Passage," "A Glimpse," "Sometimes with One I Love," and "Whispers of Heavenly Death."

Download or read book Shuffle and Breakdown written by Cody Walker and published by Waywiser Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Cody Walker's SHUFFLE AND BREAKDOWN, his first collection and a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in 2005 and 2006, is a work of comic brilliance and devastating irony. From Abbott and Costello: The Alzheimer's Years to a series of letters to Whitman from his imagined grandson, this is a wondrous strange book that operates with the precise timing of a great joke, while bracing itself for dissolution and worse. "You'll need your wits about you when you read this astonishing book. Cody Walker keeps working surprises, setting traps, yanking rugs from underfoot--and I must say, I enjoyed myself no end. Escalation, 2007, for instance, sounds as if written by a Mother Goose high on LSD. Walker is unique, no mere trickster but a serious craftsman who blurs the line of demarcation between sober poetry and light verse. Though he sometimes writes in forms usually frivolous--limericks, double dactyls, clerihews--he can do so with dark import. An amazing series of letters from a fictitious grandson of Walt Whitman is alone worth the price of admission."--X. J. Kennedy "In this case, the voice comes from some ways off, at an unexpected angle. Cody Walker's poems are singular, and severally strong. SHUFFLE AND BREAKDOWN is more than an assemblage; it's a collection with a subtending architecture, so that while one is savoring local pleasures--a brash simile, an odd and antic rhyme--one is aware of the book's shapely whole. Like Roethke, who also had a Pacific Northwest background, Walker makes adroit use of fractured nursery rhyme. Like Whitman, with whom he shares a taste for the out-flung, Walker means to be comprehensive. But SHUFFLE AND BREAKDOWN is more than a toting up of its influences. Here's a wry and rueful and utterly appealing new sensibility."--Brad Leithauser

Download or read book Christmas Poems written by John Hollander and published by Everyman's Library. This book was released on 1999-10-26 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christmas is both a holiday and a holy day, and from the start it has been associated with poetry, from the song of the seraphim above the manger to the cherished carols around the punch bowl. This garland of Christmas poems contains not only the ones you would insist on finding here ("A Visit from St. Nicholas," "Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming," and "The Twelve Days of Christmas" among them) but such equally enchanting though lesser-known Yuletide treasures as Emily Dickinson's "The Savior must have been a docile Gentleman," Anthony Hecht's "Christmas Is Coming," Rudyard Kipling's "Christmas in India," Langston Hughes's "Shepherd's Song at Christmas," Robert Graves's "The Christmas Robin," and happy surprises like Phyllis McGinley's "Office Party," Dorothy Parker's "The Maid-Servant at the Inn," and Philip Larkin's "New Year Poem."

Download or read book Someone Else s Name written by Joseph Harrison and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. "SOMEONE ELSE''S NAME is a first book full of stunning performances, each one infused with wit, feeling, and humanity, and each one delighting in the full use of the medium and its devices. It''s a happy thing to witness the emergence of such a talent."--Richard Wilbur "In this brilliant first book the deepest of feeling and the most profound thought rise up in response to a glittering surface of wit, which is never an end in itself. Throughout these poems, deep poetic learning and passionate responses to immediate experience interanimate one another. Mr. Harrison''s imagination is unflagging, and can keep going through ''As If,'' a splendid revisionary sonnet sequence, or the remarkable ''Mobile Bay Jubilee.'' His is an outstanding talent, and he does not betray it by anything but the most meticulous of workmanship."--John Hollander "SOMEONE ELSE''S NAME is a book of brilliant wit, erudition, and technical ingenuity, and, played for the highest stakes, is no less than a quest for personal and artistic identity through poem after poem in which no reader can fail ''Underneath their curlicue and flair / [to] hear the real pathos there.'' It is a stunning book."--Greg Williamson "Seven years ago the poet Greg Williamson sent me a slim manuscript by his close friend and Johns Hopkins colleague, Joe Harrison. I was very impressed by what I read, but it just didn''t prepare me for the impact of this stunning and ample first collection. Harrison has all of Williamson''s strengths. He is a punctilious metrist, a born rhymer, an inventor of graceful, intricate stanzas. He''s also ingeniously contemporary, as in the two poems for Dante the robot, which was lowered into the caldera of Mount Erebus. In flawless terza rima, of course. Or the little ode ''Air Larry,'' about the nut case who rode his helium-balloon-powered lawn chair into the jet space 16,000 feet above L.A. Yet everything he writes is invested with a deep learning, worn lightly, borne of wide reading in the canon. He is a far more mournful poet than his younger friend, and his concerns are more elemental, less cerebral. If I have any reservation about either of them, it is that they are too much concerned with the themes of iteration, with writing poetry on poetry. But that''s the reaction of a farmer to most academics. In his fifth decade, Harrison is a fully formed, dazzlingly fine poet; and every lover of our ancient art will be grateful to have this book on his shelf."--Timothy Murphy "Sad and funny by turns and often simultaneously, the quests, meditations, and laments in this rich collection are unfailingly sane--no, more than sane, wise. Furthermore, Harrison''s every poem is lullingly melodic, though each sings a different tune. This exceptional debut is a rare delight."--Rachel Hadas "Harrison''s most serious poems, with their cold, depopulated locales, pick up on the grimmest bits of Robert Frost: in ''The End of Dewitt Finley'' a snowbound salesman starves to death in his truck. After such harsh forests of symbols, it''s a joy to find ''Mobile Bay Jubilee,'' an expansive homage in giant acrobatic stanzas (borrowed from Edmund Spenser) to an annual tidal event ''when the fish come forth from the sea / And the sweet flesh of the deep can be had for a song.'' Scholars might call it a piscatory ode; Alabamians might call it a feast."--Stephen Burt "Joseph Harrison''s is a distinctive voice which is never less than highly entertaining; this is a mind of great quickness and wit, served by a sheer skill that is itself a pleasure to encounter."--Glyn Pursglove "Joseph Harrison''s first collection, SOMEONE ELSE''S NAME, carries a glowing blurb from Richard Wilbur (complimentary almost to the point of giddiness), and a lengthy, glorifying introduction by Anthony Hecht which, taken together, may be the closest thing to a money-back guarantee a publisher can offer...The book...is...a Major Accomplishment ...And, more importantly, it is enormous fun."--Jon Mooallem

Download or read book Deaf Republic written by Ilya Kaminsky and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Award • Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award • Winner of the National Jewish Book Award • Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award • Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize • Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence? Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.

Download or read book Delmore Schwartz written by James Atlas and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet is based on interviews, letters, and an extraordinary collection of unpublished papers that had never before been examined. Delmore Schwartz was only twenty-four in 1938 when his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, was published. He received praise from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. For Tate, it was “the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Eliot and Pound.” A decade later, the short-story collection The World Is a Wedding was published; many critics characterized it as the definitive portrait of their generation. In this biography, the first about the man whom John Berryman called “the most underrated poet of the twentieth century,” James Atlas traces Schwartz’s history, from the arrival of his Romanian ancestors in New York, to his youth in Washington Heights, to his career at Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy, and onward to the flowering of his generation in the '40s, when he and the critics, poets, and novelists who were his friends made their reputations. Schwartz’s brilliant satires of his friends and acquaintances, his autobiographical stories, and his letters to his illustrious peers contribute to this vivid portrait of an era—and of that era’s most trenchant chronicler.