‘Late Romance: Anthony Hecht: A Poet’s Life’
By David Yezzi
St. Martin’s Press, 480 pages

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.”
—William Carlos Williams

Not only poems, but poets die miserably every day for lack of what is found in each other’s work. Anthony Hecht (1923-2004), winner of the 1968 Pulitzer Prize, and Sylvia Plath taught at the same time at Smith College. She regarded him as a condescending male, and he thought of her as catty and self-absorbed, as David Yezzi discloses in his poignant biography of a poet reckoning with his Jewish heritage and the Holocaust in ways not dissimilar to Plath’s.

Hecht, like Plath, had his breakdowns and a failed marriage. He left teaching at Smith, as Plath did, because, like her, he found it stifling for a poet who wanted a larger connection with the world. With a German father, Plath and the Jewish Hecht each had an obsession with the Holocaust, although his fixation derived from service in World War II and an eyewitness encounter with a concentration camp.  

Plath, however put out she was with Hecht, recognized his power by including him in her anthology, “American Poetry Now: A Selection of the Best Poems by Modern American Writers.” Mr. Yezzi supposes she was attracted to Hecht’s poem, “More Light! More Light!” because of “Plath’s propensity for extreme, even violent feeling.” 

The poem, the biographer explains, opens “mid-sentence, with the execution of an English martyr during the Reformation,” and then segues to the murder of two Jews ordered by a German officer with a Lüger trained on Pole who is supposed to bury the victims alive. The English martyr “howled for the Kindly light,” but no light shines from heaven or from the “shrine at Weimar beyond the hill” (a museum dedicated to Goethe), and the Pole is shot for not treating death as the “casual” event that has “drained away” the “souls” of the Jews condemned to die.

Plath and Hecht, saw the horror of a world in which poets despair of conveying the news. On the page, at least, Plath had a meeting of minds with Hecht. Mr. Yezzi quotes Hecht on the meaning of  “More Light! More Light!”: “a vision of the kind of mental process that results in contemporary cruelty and barbarity.” Isn’t this exactly what Plath accomplishes in “Daddy,” a poem that struggles with her complicity in barbarity, past and present?

Mr. Yezzi makes much of Hecht’s traditionalism and his rejection of the “confessional poetry” pioneered by Robert Lowell and then promulgated by W.D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, and supposedly Plath. Yet this is to take Hecht’s view of himself too exclusively. Hecht was only partly right about Plath, which means he was only partly right about their places in contemporary poetry. For example, what seems confessional in Plath’s poem “Cut,” occasioned by almost slicing off part of her thumb, becomes, with allusions to British redcoats, scalping, kamikazes, and the Ku Klux Klan, about history as a bloodbath.

Mr. Yezzi makes frequent reference to Hecht’s training as an actor, so that he could read a poem like “More Light! More Light!” with a “human sonority.” Mr. Yezzi says “More Light! More Light!” “marked the arrival” of Hecht’s “mature period.” Listen to the mature Plath, who acted on a Cambridge stage, in a BBC reading of “Daddy,” and a similar performative personality is heard, a resonant authoritative voice that is about much more than itself. 

I’m sure Hecht would have objected to ranking himself with Plath, yet he recites to an audience his provocative poem, “The Dover Bitch,” with lines such as, “Try to be true to me, / And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad.” That is darkly funny in the same way Plath is darkly funny. 

Mr. Yezzi says we should not take Hecht personally — that Hecht is not a sexist but the persona of “The Dover Bitch” is. So it is with Plath, whose persona in her poetry should not be taken away by calling her “confessional.” 

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath,” “Sylvia Plath Day by Day,” and the forthcoming “The Making of Sylvia Plath.”