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“... Anthony Hecht​ never changed. His poems, first and last, look as if they’ve been measured, cut and stitched on Savile Row. His first book, A Summoning of Stones (1954), displayed a glutton’s appetite for abstraction and the fastidiousness that marked much of his work thereafter:We may consider every cloud a lakeTransmogrified, its character unselfed,At once a whale and a white wedding cakeBellowed into conspicuous ectoplasm ...”

“... ecstasy. I hope to hear much more of it. At first it seems improbable that The Venetian Vespers by Anthony Hecht should be able to sustain the weight of its three epigraphs: one from King Lear, one from Moby Dick and one by Beethoven. And indeed, Hecht’s shorter poems, chatty and clever, with their immense vocabulary ...”

“... real war poets are always war poets, peace or any time.’ This remark applies more perhaps to Anthony Hecht, who was born in 1923 and had published no poems before he went to war, than it does to anyone else. Hecht studied at Bard College then served in the US Army from 1943 to 1946. He saw action in Germany and ...”

“... random! Who’s your secret server? After ingesting   derivatives Magnus too becomes a vampire. Anthony Hecht likes that, which is not like him at all. (to be continued) Louis de Pointe du Lac’s mortal birth: blood’s all over, every   body slips and slides, and gets sticky (Aw, that’s so     icky!). Mortal Lestat gets into the Grove and ...”

“... in 1981. James Merrill, John Hollander and John Ashbery spoke in similarly emphatic terms, while Anthony Hecht saluted an ‘extraordinarily fine’ debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original. ‘I think I speak for many,’ David Kalstone wrote, ‘in saying it appeared with that sense of completeness of utterance and identity that ...”

“... than 40 years my gratitude for Hill’s art and for Lowell’s, and for 30 years my gratitude for Hecht’s,’ it is difficult not to feel that the repetitions override the disclaimers, and not to wonder what gratitude is when there is so much of it, and when it has been so insistently published. But Ricks himself wonders, as is proper, what the word for the ...”

“... little of the ostentatious virtuosity of better-known formalists such as Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, with whom he is so often, and rather unfortunately, grouped. Rather, Justice’s poems delicately induce the hypnotic state that Bishop described as her artistic ideal in a letter to Anne Stevenson: ‘What one seems to want in art, in ...”

“... its donnée, can fail to wound’ (this letter is not included in the book under review). The poet Anthony Hecht, in a Library of Congress Lecture in 1983, commented: ‘Lowell appears wonderfully unaware that a poem that cannot fail to wound must have at least some moral objection to it.’ Others made an aesthetic defence against the humane objections ...”

“... sophisticated poems versed in the Anglo-American tradition, dedicated to the likes of Mark Strand, Anthony Hecht and Susan Sontag, and aimed primarily at a circle of readers in London and New York. (He has evidently succeeded in that aim: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has just bestowed on him its ‘Genius Award’ – $250,000 with no ...”

“... deepest longing was for some unattainable separation of body and mind, and perhaps this is why, as Anthony Hecht pointed out, ‘there are probably more abstract nouns and adjectives’ in Schwartz’s work than in ‘any other modern writer’.‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me’ is a comic meditation on the burden of physicality and ‘the scrimmage of ...”

“... in the past as those files of the Spectator where he found the famous pieces by J.D. Scott and Anthony Hartley, or the scripts of John Wain’s Third Programme magazine First Reading, or copies of the Reading limited editions of Wain and Amis. Mr Morrison claims to have eschewed gossip and attended instead to such questions as: ‘Did the writers know each ...”

“... off with studio biographies written by publicists, and a kind of memoir by the screenwriter Ben Hecht (later published as My Story by Marilyn Monroe, featuring the well-spun tale of Norma Jeane’s abused childhood, and the white piano she saved from her mother’s house – a piano that sold for three-quarters of a million dollars at the Christie’s ...”