Hecht, Anthony Evan

▪ 2005

      American poet (b. Jan. 16, 1923, New York, N.Y.—d. Oct. 20, 2004, Washington, D.C.), served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (poet laureate) from 1982 to 1984. A formalist poet, he mastered a wide range of poetic forms and was noted for both the elegance and the intelligence of his work. The subject matter of his poems often touched on his experiences as an infantryman during World War II and expressed his despair over human cruelty. After the war he attended Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, where he came under the influence of John Crowe Ransom, a leader of the New Critic movement, who persuaded him to pursue a career in teaching. Hecht's first book of poems, A Summoning of Stones (1954), was well received, but it was his second collection, The Hard Hours (1967), that showed him at his best. The book, which contained “Dover Bitch,” a celebrated parody of Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach,” received the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. He pioneered a form of light verse called double dactyls that gained popularity in the 1960s and led to his collaborated work Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls (1967). He was awarded the Tanning Prize in 1997 for a career of artistic accomplishment in poetry.

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