Anthony Hecht’s Prisoners of Time

It is rather strange to be speaking, but I know you are there

Reading through Anthony Hecht’s recently published Collected Poems amply demonstrates that he wrote great poetry of many (and overlapping) kinds: lyrical (‘Curriculum Vitae’, ‘Still Life’), narrative (‘The Short End’, ‘“More Light! More Light!”’), political (‘Terms’), ekphrastic (‘The Deodand’), satiric (‘The Dover Bitch’), comic (‘The Ghost in the Martini’) and meditative (‘Rites and Ceremonies’). Despite the excellence of these examples, Hecht’s richest, most compelling and moving poetry may be his dramatic verse. Though early admirers (Harold Bloom and Christopher Ricks among them) stressed Hecht’s achievement in the genre – comparing him, respectively, to Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot – recent critical opinion has turned. David Orr slights Hecht’s ‘speech-imitating creations’ as ‘talking dolls’, while William Logan dismisses his ‘strained personae’ and ‘humdrum people’. Even A.E. Stallings, in an admiring review, allows that among the ‘barriers to Hecht’s wider popularity’ is his ‘penchant for extended dramatic monologues’.

Hecht’s successes in the genre include ‘Green: An Epistle’, ‘See Naples and Die’ and the superb ‘Apprehensions’, an unsettling poem of apprehensive and misapprehending childhood. But I want to focus on one kind of dramatic monologue which Hecht was a master of: the kind spoken by an attenuated, disappointed, belated speaker, who reminisces on and from a ‘shipwrecked existence’ (as Hecht says of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Crusoe in England’). These speakers are often approaching death and are driven to make one last-ditch effort to recall, confess or act. This kind of dramatic monologue, which might be ...