Review
"Earnestness with irony, epistemological ambition with ambiguity, complexity of feeling, fusion of emotion with music and idea -- these are the modernist virtues Hecht both respects and exhibits."--Ron Smith, Georgia Review
Review
"Unheard melodies may be sweeter, as Keats writes, but in the essays of another masterful poet and thinker about poetry, Anthony Hecht, we find it delicious to be listening as if for the first time. No reader of Hecht's dazzling essays on rhyme, on the sestina, or on Shakespeare's sonnets, will fail to hear a fine-tuned music. Hecht's characteristically original leaps of association among the arts also ensure that we can visualize the heretofore unobserved kinship of Sir Philip Sidney and Jean-Antoine Watteau, or of Elizabeth Bishop and Hieronymous Bosch. Here is a book to be seen and heard in the mind long after we close it."--Mary Jo Salter
Book Description
The fruit of a lifetime's reading and thinking about literature, its delights and its responsibilities, this book by acclaimed poet and critic Anthony Hecht explores the mysteries of poetry, offering profound insight into poetic form, meter, rhyme, and meaning. Ranging from Renaissance to contemporary poets, Hecht considers the work of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Noel; Housman, Hopkins, Eliot, and Auden; Frost, Bishop, and Wilbur; Amichai, Simic, and Heaney. Stepping back from individual poets, Hecht muses on rhyme and on meter, and also discusses St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians and Melville's Moby-Dick. Uniting these diverse subjects is Hecht's preoccupation with the careful deployment of words, the richness and versatility of language and of those who use it well.Elegantly written, deeply informed, and intellectually playful, Melodies Unheard confirms Anthony Hecht's reputation as one of our most original and imaginative thinkers on the literary arts.
About the Author
Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) was the author of seven poetry collections and several works of criticism. He was awarded the Pullizter Prize in 1968 for The Hard Hours and his other honors include the Bollingen Prize, the Eugenio Montale Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Dorothea Tanning Award, and the Robert Frost Medal.
Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Unheard melodies may be sweeter, as Keats writes, but in the essays of another masterful poet and thinker about poetry, Anthony Hecht, we find it delicious to be listening as if for the first time. No reader of Hecht's dazzling essays on rhyme, on the sestina, or on Shakespeare's sonnets, will fail to hear a fine-tuned music. Hecht's characteristically original leaps of association among the arts also ensure that we can visualize the heretofore unobserved kinship of Sir Philip Sidney and Jean-Antoine Watteau, or of Elizabeth Bishop and Hieronymous Bosch. Here is a book to be seen and heard in the mind long after we close it." Mary Jo Salter
The fruit of a lifetime's reading and thinking about literature, its delights and its responsibilities, this book by acclaimed poet and critic Anthony Hecht explores the mysteries of poetry, offering profound insight into poetic form, meter, rhyme, and meaning. Ranging from Renaissance to contemporary poets, Hecht considers the work of Shakespeare, Sidney, and Noel; Housman, Hopkins, Eliot, and Auden; Frost, Bishop, and Wilbur; Amichai, Simic, and Heaney. Stepping back from individual poets, Hecht muses on rhyme and on meter, and also discusses St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians and Melville's Moby-Dick. Uniting these diverse subjects is Hecht's preoccupation with the careful deployment of words, the richness and versatility of language and of those who use it well.
Elegantly written, deeply informed, and intellectually playful, Melodies Unheard confirms Anthony Hecht's reputation as one of our most original and imaginative thinkers on the literary arts.
About the Author:Anthony Hecht was born in New York City in 1923.His books of poetry include A Summoning of Stones (1954); the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hard Hours (1967); Millions of Strange Shadows (1977); The Venetian Vespers (1980); The Transparent Man (1991); Flight Among the Tombs (1996); and The Darkness and the Light (2001). His 1967 collection of poems, The Hard Hours, won the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of Obbligati: Essays in Criticism (1986), The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden (1993), and On the Laws of the Poetic Art (1995). Among his many honors are the Bollingen Prize, the Eugenio Montale Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Dorothea Tanning Award, and the Robert Frost Medal, as well as fellowships from the American Academy of Rome and the Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundations. A Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets, he lives in Washington, D.C.
SYNOPSIS
Poet and critic Hecht presents eighteen essays in which he reflects on the use of language in poetic and literary works that he admires. Among his subjects are Shakespeare's Sonnets, St. Paul's epistle to the Galatians, Robert Frost's "The Wood Pile," Seamus Heaney's prose, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
Melodies Unheard is a defense of rhyme and meter by a poet who has long stood his ground against modernity. — Dinitia Smith
Mark Strand
Anthony Hecht's vast knowledge of literature and his gift for mesmerizing argument are both amply present in Melodies Unheard. Whether defending the sestina against accusations of boredom and dolefulness or examining the structure of Shakespeare's sonnets or unraveling some of the complexity of Moby-Dick, these essays are models of civility, candor, and grace. I know of no other poet, certainly none of Anthony Hecht's stature, who sheds as much light on the intricacies and hidden designs of poems and who does it with such style.
Richard Wilbur
Anthony Hecht declares himself 'a poet first and only secondarily a critic, ' but Melodies Unheard proves again that he is a master in both trades. His discourse on such subjects as rhyme, the sestina, and 'the music of forms' is both scholarly and delightful; his articles on individual poets are finely done; and best of all, perhaps, are his penetrating treatments of particular poems his reading of Bishop's 'The Man-Moth, ' for instance, his biographical placement of Frost's 'The Wood-Pile, ' his discussion of emotional paradox in Hopkins's 'The Wreck of the Deutschland.' When Hecht goes beyond the preserve of poetry, as in his forceful pieces on Moby-Dick and St. Paul, it is always a splendid bonus.
Stephen Yenser
The wise products of a preeminent practitioner of the art, Anthony Hecht's essays on poetry spring from a passionate curiosity about the work of his predecessors and peers. Their fit audience includes those figures themselves Shakespeare and Sidney, Housman and Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop and Seamus Heaney and their other ardent readers. Uninterested in the kind of local poetics and short views that are based on positions and programs, Hecht converses with writers poets and scholars alike who are committed to the long tradition and the timeless individual talents it nourishes. Although intensely personal (how many others have written originally on Frost's "The Wood-Pile, " or subtly on three exemplary English translations of a virtually perfect lyric by Apollinaire, or on Henry Noel at all? no, because intensely personal his essays on a broad range of topics will one by one fascinate a broad range of readers: to wit, those intrigued by the multifarious nuances, technical and philosophical, the unheard music, of literary genius.
Library Journal
"I see poetic gifts of a very high order passed by and neglected while other poets no more than unclothed emperors, are widely honored for their fine tailoring and natty style." So states Hecht (himself a poet of no small talent) in this collection of essays devoted to poetry's hidden treasures. In his quest for the rare and precious, Hecht cares not whether a poem follows conventional structural rules or breaks them but whether it is actually good. He circuitously defines goodness by offering a wide range of poetry, classic to modern, as structured as Shakespeare's sonnets or Sidney's sestinas, as surprising as Elizabeth Bishop's modern metaphysics or the surrealistic twists in Charles Simic's poetry. In every example, he juxtaposes analysis of structure with penetration into the poem's psyche. His choices are eclectic, for he not only illuminates overlooked gems such as Henry Noel's "Gaze Not on Swans," praising its combined sensuality of sound and image, but also pries into standards such as Eliot's The Waste Land and Frost's "The Woodpile" to unearth startling interpretations. The anecdotal data are fascinating. How many know, for example, that Houseman satirized Longfellow's "Excelsior" and that Hopkins owes much of his religious depth to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola? Hecht's insights are too numerous to mention, for he touches on every aspect of poetry while exhausting none. But no blame-he confessed this intent in his introduction. This wonderful, instructive volume will engage all lovers of fine poetry. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.-Nedra Crowe-Evers, Sacramento P.L., CA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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