Anthony Hecht, 81; Confronted Brutality Through Visual Verse

Anthony Hecht, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work confronted the brutality of his time in a voice praised for its unique music and visual perception, has died. He was 81.

Hecht died Wednesday at his home in Washington, D.C., according to his wife, Helen. He was diagnosed over the summer with lymphoma and declined rapidly, she said.

A formalist who wrote in meter, rhyme and stanza at a time when most poets had turned to free verse, Hecht has been compared favorably to W.H. Auden and Robert Frost. He published on an irregular basis, producing nine collections of verse, but belying the notion that poetry is a young person's game, he published five of those volumes after age 50. He also wrote essays and criticism, including a well-received book-length study of Auden's work.

Dana Gioia, poet and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, called Hecht "a magisterial senior presence in American poetry."

"He created musical surfaces to talk about dark themes like war, abandonment and cruelty. He had the power to take the darkest subjects and make them beautiful, and in the process you were compelled to look at your deepest fears."

Timothy Steele, a poet and professor at Cal State Los Angeles, said Hecht "wrote about the horrors and follies of 20th century history in a readily accessible manner. His work refers to complex questions of history and art, but at the same time it addresses the intelligent lay reader. It is not just poetry for specialists."

As a poet, Hecht questioned the state of humanity in the face of what he termed "much casual death." And he did so in a powerful and dignified manner that rejected emotionalism without rejecting feeling.

"Hecht's poetry doesn't have the qualities of invective or outrage. He states and evokes in the most hauntingly elegant language, he freezes the horror of the situation," said Robert Faggen, a professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.

"Hecht's love of poetic form and language was a search for a hidden law in a lawless world," Faggen said. "The stark contrast between the elegance of his craft and the horrors it embraced created haunting tension and biting irony."

Hecht won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968 for his second collection, "The Hard Hours." He also received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1983), the Wallace Stevens Award (1999) and the 1997 Tanning Prize, given by the Academy of American Poets for lifetime achievement.