Anthony Hecht (American University Studies)

Anthony Hecht, a critical study, uses a variety of approaches in detailed analyses of the major poems of the 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winner in poetry. The book traces influence, illuminates individual poems via historical and biographical information, and identifies motifs such as «man's painful doubleness» and «extravagance» which define the world Hecht lives in. The poems are viewed as emblematic of the poet's struggle for equilibrium on the plank between the rocks of determinism and the swamp of mysticism.