Collected Poems Including late and uncollected work

In his centenary year, this volume of the Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate’s poems celebrates the indispensable artistry of a writer who faced the history of his era with a “clear-eyed mercy toward human weakness” (NYTBR) and was hailed in his day as “the best poet writing in English” (Joseph Brodsky).

This volume brings together for the first time all of the poems that appeared in Anthony Hecht’s seven trade collections, from A Summoning of Stones of 1954 through to The Darkness and the Light of 2001; it adds the remarkable work contained in his posthumously issued Interior Skies: Late Poems from Liguria of 2011; and it rounds this out with the best of the many poems which were left uncollected at the time of his death in 2004, the earliest dating from 1950 and the latest from 2001. Collected Poems will appear in the same season as the first biography of Hecht, who bore witness to the shaping events of his time, which continue to shape our own, as an infantryman in the Second World War.

As the editor Philip Hoy states in his introduction: “Anthony Hecht once wrote that poems can allow us to contemplate our ‘sweetest triumphs’ and our ‘deepest desolations,’ and by employing ‘the manifold devices of art’ to recover for us what he memorably called ‘the inexhaustible plenitude of the world.’ The work gathered together here amply attests to the truth of that claim, and makes it clear that Hecht was one of the finest poets, not just of his generation, but of the twentieth century.”

ANTHONY HECHT is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Hard Hours, which received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968. He is also the author of several volumes of essays and criticism, among them a book-length study of the poetry of W. H. Auden called The Hidden Law. He received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Eugenio Montale Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Robert Frost Medal. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He died in 2004.

PHILIP HOY was born in London in 1952, and educated at the Universities of York and Leeds. He is founder of The Waywiser Press and he co-founded (with Peter Dale and Ian Hamilton) Between The Lines, which is devoted to publishing book-length interviews with contemporary poets.