Matthew Sperling

Rhyme & Reason

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht

By

Johns Hopkins University Press 365pp £18 order from our bookshop

The American poet Anthony Hecht (1923–2004) is an unfashionable figure. His work is celebrated for its mastery of traditional form and its dedication to the high style, in common with the work of friends such as James Merrill and Richard Wilbur. But at this late stage it is hard to see how this writing – with its formal polish, its rarefied but sometimes stiff and antique diction, its rather academic literariness – could make a comeback among a wider readership when the most-loved poets from the generation who came of age in mid-century are the likes of Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg, whose work is full of breezy fun, expressive trauma and rule-breaking.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    Follow Us