Poets’ reputations often drop in critical stock and general popularity in the decade or two after their death. It takes an event—a biography, new scholarship, a collected or selected poems—to reverse the inertia. Since his death in 2004, Anthony Hecht has somewhat slipped off the poetry radar except among aficionados and connoisseurs. A new biography and a career-spanning Collected Poems are just the ticket for recentering him among the exceptionally strong generation of poets who came into their own in the years following the Second World War.
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