‘Apprehensions’: Anthony Hecht’s Meditations on History and Poetry

Elena Valli is a PhD researcher and Irish Research Council postgraduate fellow at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) working on mid twentieth-century American and British poetry. Her thesis explores the use of Renaissance affective prayer and religious meditation in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, and Geoffrey Hill. Elena received the Rose Visiting Research Fellowship for English-Language, Poetry, and Literature in 2024 to study the Hecht papers preserved at Emory University Libraries.

As a long-time student and admirer of Anthony Hecht (1923-2004), I felt lucky and honoured to receive a short-term fellowship at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library to study his papers. A polymath and one of the most perceptive poets of his generation, a Pulitzer-winning Poet Laureate as well as a professor of English and an infantry man in World War Two, Hecht contained many personas and an even greater multitude of interests, as reflected by his extensive archival collection. This treasure trove includes drafts of his books of poetry and criticism, humorous vignettes for the US army papers and light verse limericks, lecture notes and essays, and a prolific thread of literary correspondence with the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Harold Bloom, Eleanor Cook, and Seamus Heaney, among others.

My specific interest was with Hecht’s poems and reflections on vision and meditation. Across his readings and writings, Hecht remained concerned with the nature of vision – historical, religious, and self-reflective – and especially with its ethical and emotional implications. One of his most scarring wartime experiences had been, reportedly, his task of collecting testimonies from the victims of Flossenbürg concentration camp, many of whom shared his Jewish and German heritage, and to testify to an unspeakable destiny that he himself had avoided by mere chance.[1] The moral complexities of witnessing informed his poetic taste; he taught and admired Shakespeare and especially King Lear, a play in which the eye can both illuminate and warp one’s understanding of the outside world. He was greatly invested in both the Jewish and the Christian devotional and cultural tradition and was an avid reader of those religious poets who used sight as a contemplative medium between man and the divine, including Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Donne and George Herbert, whose names appear frequently among his papers.

The many meanings of ‘looking’ are similarly demonstrated in his own poems: ‘Apprehensions’ plays on the double entendre of the word (to both ‘perceive’ and ‘worry’) to summon the paradoxes of childhood; ‘An Overview’ is written from the perspective of aerial soldiers, showing how distant vision, which reduces human targets to blurry, toy-sized shapes, can remove or attenuate moral scruples in the exercise of violence, while ‘The Grapes’ describes a quasi-spiritual epiphany. If close-up observation and meditation can facilitate empathy, self-understanding, and transcendence, it remains almost impossible to attain absolute revelations, as a poem like ‘Meditation’ reveals. In this composition, Hecht does not deny the reality of human suffering, nor does he wish to abstract it, but he suggests that there is both an ethical and an aesthetic value in the act of paying attention to the world around us. Among his fragments, a page discussing the poem refers to an ‘oscillation between a real world and an imaginary one…into which we seem to enter and even seem to inhabit.’

Moving from these examples, my own research focuses on the use of Christian religious meditative techniques in the poetry of Hecht and two contemporary poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Geoffrey Hill. All three were closely acquainted with the ‘metaphysical poems’ which, as Louis Martz’s 1954 book The Poetry of Meditation demonstrates, were directly inspired by the meditational methods of Ignatius of Loyola and other mystics, diffused in both Catholic and Protestant countries. Moreover, they engaged directly with Martz’s study and with the religious texts of meditative mystics like Ignatius, St. Teresa, and John of the Cross. These techniques allowed one to become more familiar with abstract biblical concepts and figures by visualising them first-hand, not just intellectually but also affectively and experientially. When integrated into their poetry, these exercises helped these poets to contemplate unimaginable events beyond the religious – the violence of the war and the Holocaust, socio-cultural difficulties, and personal loss.

Around 1980, Hecht wrote an essay on Hopkins’s ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ where he discusses, among other aspects, Hopkins’s method of composition inspired by his Jesuit training. According to Hecht, Hopkins’ used the Ignatian ‘Composition of Place’ (a practice which guides the meditator to re-create the context to be contemplated upon in sensuous and concrete detail) to re-evoke the terrible accident. Hopkins’s poem moved from an objective chronicle of the facts as reported in the Times to produce a highly immersive portrait of the suffering and panicked state of the subjects. In his example, Hecht found one way for an external observer to represent traumatic events, maintaining a close, intimate perspective without appropriation, as noted in every draft of the essay. Arguably, he followed a similar method in his own tribute poems to the Holocaust, such as ‘The Book of Yolek.’ His essay had partly been inspired by Martz’s book and by his correspondence with Timothy Healy, a Jesuit priest and president of Georgetown university and the New York Public Library. Reading their letters preserved in the archives as well as the drafts for the essay illuminated some of Hecht’s perspective on Hopkins. Hopkins also appears in course syllabi and lecture notes, where he features prominently, and in other critical writings, such as ‘The Structure of Poetry.’ (Box 104 ff 5)

The collection moreover contains one letter from Martz to Hecht, testifying to their acquaintance. Looking through Hecht’s folders revealed mentions of Martz’s work in unpublished writings. A paper he gave on ‘Poetry and Religion’ at a Poetry Conference in West Chester university in 2004 (box 109, ff 46), the year of his death, included a mention of ‘The Poetry of Meditation’ and advocated for unorthodox experiments in religious poetry – some of which he had attempted himself, as in his poem ‘Sacrifice,’ which juxtaposes Isaac’s near death to the aggression of a child during World War Two. In a review of Robert Lowell’s Collected Prose, published in 1988 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux (box 101, ff 29) Hecht returned to the same topic, possibly inspired by Lowell’s essay on Hopkins contained in the book. In partial agreement with Lowell’s definition of Eliot’s mature poetry as contemplative and yet undramatic, Hecht suggests that poetry should emphasise the latter quality by quoting Martz’s statement that meditative verse ‘brings together the senses, the emotions, and the intellectual faculties of man; brings them together in a moment of dramatic, creative experience.’[2] Arguably, his own dramatic monologues and narrative poems, partly inspired by Lowell (similarly interested in religious meditation, as observed by Jerome Mazzaro),[3] gain in dramatic emphasis through his observation of meditative techniques.

Hecht’s poetry has been read in comparison to Hill’s by  Christopher Ricks,[4] and I was interested in gaining further evidence of the relationship between the two. By reading Hecht’s notes for his third collection, Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), I was able to discover that he sent the book to Hill. He moreover corresponded with Henry Hart, who wished to include both his and Hill’s work in his poetry magazine. Hart’s research on Hill,[5] which explores his poetic use of Jesuit Spirituality, is mentioned in his letter to Hecht. Bishop was a closer acquaintance; her many postcards and letters congratulate him on various achievements and disclose her observations on some of his poems, such as ‘The Odds’ and ‘Coming Home.’ Her letters include significant information about her own work and perspective – her own favourite line, for example, or her habit of fixing practical details about the descriptions in her poems (in reference to  Bishop’s poem ‘Faustina, or Rock Roses’ Hecht had pointed out that the eighty-watt lightbulb mentioned in the poem were not as such).

It is a real privilege to take a glance into the rich, witty, and endlessly fascinating exchanges between these authors, and even to discover the marginalia, images, and doodles that come with the creation of some of the most celebrated, enduring poems of their time, which again shed light on the intensely visual nature of their work. Over a century from his birth, the Hecht collection at Emory discloses the depth and breadth of Hecht’s inspiration behind his output, and proves to be a prolific source of information. I am especially grateful to the staff at Emory Archives for their kindness and help throughout my stay, and to Emory University and the Irish Research Council for supporting my research.

Citations:

[1] Anthony Hecht, Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy, (London: Between the Lines, 2001), 26.

[2] Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 1.

[3] Jerome Mazzaro, The Poetic Themes of Robert Lowell, (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1965).

[4] Christopher Ricks, True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell under the Sign of Eliot and Pound, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010).

[5] Henry Hart, The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill, (Carbondale, Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986).