Anthony Hecht

Anthony Hecht (1947)

Anthony Evan Hecht (born January 16, 1923 in New York City , United States , † October 20, 2004 in Washington, DC ) was an American poet and writer . His works included dealing with the horrors of the 20th century, especially the Holocaust .

biography

Hecht was born to German- Jewish parents in New York City . He attended various schools in the city and was a. a. a classmate of Jack Kerouac's at Horace Mann School. As a student at Bard College , he studied the works of Wallace Stevens , WH Auden , TS Eliot and Dylan Thomas . It was then that Hecht decided to become a writer. After graduating, he came to Germany in 1944 as a member of the armed forces of the United States . He took part in the Ruhrkessel battle and fought in Eger in what was then Reichsgau Sudetenland . A defining event for Hecht was April 23, 1945, when his unit took part in the liberation of the concentration camp in Flossenbürg and questioned French camp inmates to obtain evidence against the camp commandant.

writer

Hecht came to Japan on September 25, 1945, where he wrote for The Stars and Stripes , a newspaper for the American armed forces. He left Japan on February 25, 1946 and returned to the United States. He received his Masters from Columbia University and came into contact with the writers Randall Jarrell , Elizabeth Bishop and Allen Tate . In 1947 he went to the University of Iowa , where he lectured in the Iowa Writers' Workshop , a course in creative writing . Hecht published his first volume of poetry, 'A Summoning of Stones', in 1954, specifically processing his war experiences in his second work, 'The Hard Hours' (1967). Hecht was mainly active as a university lecturer: from 1967 to 1985 at the University of Rochester , at Bard College , in Harvard as well as at Georgetown University and Yale University . A special poem measure is the double dactyl , which was invented by Hecht and Paul Pascal in 1951.

Awards and honors

• 1951: Prize from the American Academy in Rome
• 1968: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Hard Hours
• 1970: Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 1975: Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 1982: Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress (1982–1984)
• 1983: Bollingen Price, Kniecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University
• 1988: Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
• 1989: Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry
• 1997: Wallace Stevens Award
• 1999: Frost Medal

Works

Poetry

• A Summoning of Stones (1954)
• The Hard Hours (1967)
• Millions of Strange Shadows (1977)
• The Venetian Vespers (1979)
• The Transparent Man (1990)
• Flight Among the Tombs (1998)
• The Darkness and the Light (2001)

Translations

• Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes (1973) (with Helen Bacon)

Other works

• Obbligati: Essays in Criticism (1986)
• The Hidden Law: The Poetry of WH Auden (1993)
• On the Laws of the Poetic Art (1995)
• Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry ( Johns Hopkins University Press , 2003)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Harvey Shapiro: Anthony Hecht, a Formalist Poet, Dies at 81 . In: The New York Times , October 22, 2004. 
2. ↑ Matt Schudel: Poet, essayist Anthony Hecht Dies at 81 . In: Washington Post , October 22, 2004. 
3. ^ Geoffrey Lindsay: Anthony Hecht, Private First Class. In: Yale Review. 2008, Volume 96, 3rd Edition, pp. 1-26. (PDF, English)
4. ↑ Jonathan Post, The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2012, ISBN 978-1-4214-0730-2 . (English)
5. ↑ Anthony Hecht . In: The Daily Telegraph , October 25, 2004. 
6. ↑ Anthony Hecht and John Hollander , eds. Jiggery-Pokery, A Compendium of Double Dactyls (New York: Atheneum, 1967) (English)
7. ↑ Elizabeth A. Brennan, Elizabeth C. Clarage: Who's who of Pulitzer Prize winners . Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999, ISBN 978-1-57356-111-2 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
8. ↑ Members: Anthony Hecht. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 3, 2019 .