a Hecht hint and a Merrill moment
Anthony Hecht was a great midcentury American poet of the type now known as "formalist" - meaning he wrote elegant verses in rhyme and metre, though back then I'm not sure people really obsessed the way we do about labelling it as such. (New formalism: "The old formalism never went away!") Hecht is one of a handful of masters of the art of formal poetry in midcentury America (leaving Wallace Stevens, the Master of masters, out of the equation, because frankly he had other fish to fry) along with Richard Wilbur and James Merrill.
Now, I should say that I admire Hecht very much. He wrote some poems I love and am inspired (and sometimes a bit cowed) by, including the wonderfully-named "Proust on Skates." But my love for Merrill is deeper, and in fact in type it is not unlike my love for Mozart.
Therefore it seems appropriate that Harold Bloom has apparently called Merrill the Mozart of 20th century poetry; and significant that my friend and editor Ernest Hilbert has then gone on to say that if this is the case then Hecht - who wrote much about the Holocaust and his experiences in the war, and who had a hotline to some inner demons that would have many of us hiding under the bed - must be its Mahler.
And there, in a nutshell, we have it. What do you think? (Well - that is the nutshell. All I have to do now is crack it.)
Here are three stanzas from Hecht's poem, "For James Merrill: An Adieu":
But you, dear friend, managed to slip away,
Actually disappear int he dead of winter
More perfectly than Yeats. As at a show,
While we were savoring your skills, the play
Of your words, your elegant, serious banter,
You cloaked yourself, vanished like Porspero
Or Houdini, escapoing from the padlocked fact,
Monacles, blindfolds, all our earthly ties,
Leaving us stunned in the middle of his act,
The stage vacant, expecting some surprise
Reentry from the wings to a rousing Lizst
Fanfare, tumultuous applause, a bow
And a gentle, pleased, self-deprecating smile.
There comes no manager hither to explain.
Words fail us, from the weak and fatuous "ciao,
Bello," to the bellowing grand style,
As we shuffle out to the shabby street and the rain.
Let's just hope I can do something good with it. (And, do you know, I too have a poem in which Houdini figures prominently...)
3 comments:
Some interesting implied hubris here. The clear allusion in those first few lines to Auden's elegy for Yeats not only casts Merrill in the role of Yeats, it necessarily puts Hecht in the position of Auden. I admire both Merrill and Hecht, but I don't think either of them is up to the implied comparison.
Richard, well that's an interesting point - if a bit deflating to a person who's trying to find an essay subject!
Nooooo, not at all - and I think by that reckoning there's hubris everywhere in literature - and painting, and music - as artists do this kind of thing all the time.
Rather than see it as an issue around quality, it might be interesting to look at the relationship between subject and object. Or simply relationships in poetry generally. And by that one could equally mean poems, as well as poets.
And, as one would expect, Hecht handles it with subtlety and aplomb. But it's there as a subtext. If I wrote a threnody for Auden, beginning "Weep no more for Adonais," I would be praising Auden by the implied comparison to Keats; but by suggesting that I was qualified to make that comparison in those terms, I'd be setting myself up as Shelley. (I should add that I have no desire to fall upon the thorns of life, nor to bleed.)
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