Anthony Hecht

Anthony Hecht was born in New York, New York, in 1923. His books of poetry include The Darkness and the Light (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001); Flight Among the Tombs (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); The Transparent Man (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Collected Earlier Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); The Venetian Vespers (Atheneum, 1979); Millions of Strange Shadows (Atheneum, 1977); The Hard Hours (Atheneum, 1967), which won the Pulitzer Prize; and A Summoning of Stones (The Macmillan Company, 1954).

Hecht is also author of On the Laws of Poetic Art: The Andrew Mellon Lectures, 1992 (Princeton University Press, 1995) and Obbligati: Essays in Criticism (Atheneum, 1986); co-translator with Helen Bacon of Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes (Oxford University Press, 1973); and editor of The Essential Herbert (Ecco Press, 1987) and Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls, coedited with John Hollander (Atheneum,1967).

Hecht has received the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Loines Award, the Librex-Guggenheim Eugenio Montale Award, and the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy in Rome, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lived in Washington, D.C.

Anthony Hecht died on October 20, 2004.