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 lake
Transmogrified, its character unselfed,
At once a whale and a white wedding cake
Bellowed into conspicuous ectoplasm.
It is a lake’s ghost that goes voyaging.

The book received measured but disappointing reviews (‘many of the poems have very little content, emotional or otherwise’; ‘all is craftsmanship held up for our admiration’; ‘his witty fancy gets out of control’). What reviewers seemed to resist were not Hecht’s Audenesque tendencies, but the further influence of Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, who could not write without overwriting.

Born in 1923 in New York City, Hecht had a privileged but disrupted childhood. His father worked at a fake job paid for by his father-in-law. The boy attended private schools, rarely thriving as a student, and didn’t discover poetry until he entered college the year before Pearl Harbor. Though he took basic training at twenty, Hecht’s division was not deployed until the final months of the war, when it liberated the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany. As he knew some French and German, Hecht was asked to interview the survivors. He told Philip Hoy, who has edited his Collected Poems (Knopf, £42), that ‘the place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after, I would wake shrieking.’ He also saw his own men machine-gun a group of German women and children holding white flags. During those last months of the war, half the soldiers in his company were killed or, in Hecht’s words, ‘severely mutilated’.