Böcker av Anthony Hecht

A magisterial exploration of poetry's place in the fine arts by one of the twentieth century's leading poets In this book, eminent poet Anthony Hecht explores the art of poetry and its relationship to the other fine arts. While the problems he treats entail both philosophic and theoretical discussion, he never allows abstract speculation to overshadow his delight in the written texts that he introduces, or in the specific examples of painting and music to which he refers. After discussing literature's links with painting and music, Hecht investigates the theme of paradise and wilderness, especially in Shakespeare's The Tempest. He then turns to the question of public and private art, exploring the ways in which all the arts participate in balances between private and public modes of discourse, and between an exclusive or elitist role and the openly political. Beginning with a discussion of architecture as an illustration of a more general theme of discord and balance, the penultimate lecture probes the inner contradictions of works of art and our reactions to them, while the final piece concerns art and morality.

"In his centenary year, a collection of the Pulitzer Prize winner'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 'absolute raw simplicity and directness' (Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate of England, 1984-1998). Anthony Hecht, whose output spanned eight volumes, beginning in 1954 with A Summoning of Stones, served as an infantryman in World War II and participated in the liberation of the death camps in Germany. His aesthetic--bound up with a need to see the best and worst of humankind with unsparing clarity--was shaped by the cadences of the King James Bible and great literature of the past. From the seven deadly sins to a Manhattan scene of Third Avenue in sunlight, or his poems of the many faces of Death ('Death the Oxford Don,' 'Death the Whore,' 'Death the Film Director'), Hecht's subject matter called him to a formal elegance inextricably woven with the dramatic force, thematic ambition, and powerful emotions in each poem. As the late J. D. McClatchy wrote, the rules of Anthony Hecht's art were 'moral principles meant finally to reveal the structure of human dilemmas and sympathies'"