{"id":10615,"date":"2025-04-21T13:55:34","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T13:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/?p=10615"},"modified":"2025-04-21T13:55:34","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T13:55:34","slug":"valli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/2025\/04\/21\/valli\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Apprehensions\u2019: Anthony Hecht\u2019s Meditations on History and Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Elena Valli<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

My specific interest was with Hecht\u2019s poems and reflections on vision and meditation. Across his readings and writings, Hecht remained concerned with the nature of vision \u2013 historical, religious, and self-reflective \u2013 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 Flossenb\u00fcrg 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]<\/a> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 1A Donne-inspired juvenile poem by Hecht, Box 89, ff 19<\/p><\/div>\n

The many meanings of \u2018looking\u2019 are similarly demonstrated in his own poems: \u2018Apprehensions\u2019 plays on the double entendre of the word (to both \u2018perceive\u2019 and \u2018worry\u2019) to summon the paradoxes of childhood; \u2018An Overview\u2019 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 \u2018The Grapes\u2019 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 \u2018Meditation\u2019 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 \u2018oscillation between a real world and an imaginary one\u2026into which we seem to enter and even seem to inhabit.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 2 A comment on his poem \u2018Meditation\u2019 Box 110, ff. 7<\/p><\/div>\n

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 \u2018metaphysical poems\u2019 which, as Louis Martz\u2019s 1954 book The Poetry of Meditation<\/em> 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 the violence of the war and the Holocaust, socio-cultural difficulties, and personal loss.<\/p>\n

Around 1980, Hecht wrote an essay on Hopkins\u2019s \u2018The Wreck of the Deutschland\u2019 where he discusses, among other aspects, Hopkins\u2019s method of composition inspired by his Jesuit training. According to Hecht, Hopkins\u2019 used the Ignatian \u2018Composition of Place\u2019 (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\u2019s poem moved from an objective chronicle of the facts as reported in the Times <\/em>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 \u2018The Book of Yolek.\u2019 His essay had partly been inspired by Martz\u2019s 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\u2019s perspective on Hopkins. Hopkins also appears in course syllabi and lecture notes, where he features prominently, and in other critical writings, such as \u2018The Structure of Poetry.\u2019 (Box 104 ff 5)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 3 TS draft of \u201con Hopkins \u2018The Wreck of the Deutschland,\u2019\u201d Box 99 ff 16<\/p><\/div>\n

The collection moreover contains one letter from Martz to Hecht, testifying to their acquaintance. Looking through Hecht\u2019s folders revealed mentions of Martz\u2019s work in unpublished writings. A paper he gave on \u2018Poetry and Religion\u2019 at a Poetry Conference in West Chester university in 2004 (box 109, ff 46), the year of his death, included a mention of \u2018The Poetry of Meditation\u2019 and advocated for unorthodox experiments in religious poetry \u2013 some of which he had attempted himself, as in his poem \u2018Sacrifice,\u2019 which juxtaposes Isaac\u2019s near death to the aggression of a child during World War Two. In a review of Robert Lowell\u2019s Collected Prose<\/em>, published in 1988 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux (box 101, ff 29) Hecht returned to the same topic, possibly inspired by Lowell\u2019s essay on Hopkins contained in the book. In partial agreement with Lowell\u2019s definition of Eliot\u2019s mature poetry as contemplative and yet undramatic, Hecht suggests that poetry should emphasise the latter quality by quoting Martz\u2019s statement that meditative verse \u2018brings together the senses, the emotions, and the intellectual faculties of man; brings them together in a moment of dramatic, creative experience.\u2019[2]<\/a> Arguably, his own dramatic monologues and narrative poems, partly inspired by Lowell (similarly interested in religious meditation, as observed by Jerome Mazzaro),[3]<\/a> gain in dramatic emphasis through his observation of meditative techniques.<\/p>\n

Hecht\u2019s poetry has been read in comparison to Hill\u2019s by  Christopher Ricks,[4]<\/a> and I was interested in gaining further evidence of the relationship between the two. By reading Hecht\u2019s notes for his third collection, Millions of Strange Shadows<\/em> (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\u2019s work in his poetry magazine. Hart\u2019s research on Hill,[5]<\/a> 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 \u2018The Odds\u2019 and \u2018Coming Home.\u2019 Her letters include significant information about her own work and perspective \u2013 her own favourite line, for example, or her habit of fixing practical details about the descriptions in her poems (in reference to  Bishop\u2019s poem \u2018Faustina, or Rock Roses\u2019 Hecht had pointed out that the eighty-watt lightbulb mentioned in the poem were not as such).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Figure 4 Letter from Elizabeth Bishop to Anthony Hecht, Box 12 ff 12<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Citations:<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Anthony Hecht, Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy<\/em>, (London: Between the Lines, 2001), 26.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century<\/em>, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 1.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Jerome Mazzaro, The Poetic Themes of Robert Lowell<\/em>, (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1965).<\/p>\n

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

[5]<\/a> Henry Hart, The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill<\/em>, (Carbondale, Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8287,"featured_media":10616,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[430,506],"tags":[196,82],"class_list":["post-10615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-following-the-fellows","category-literature-and-poetry","tag-anthony-hecht","tag-irish-literary-collections"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/files\/2025\/04\/Picture1-elena.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10615"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10621,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10615\/revisions\/10621"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}