The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden by Anthony Hecht (PDF)

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In this study – the fruit of a lifelong critical and imaginative engagement with W H. Auden’s works – Anthony Hecht identifies and traces consistent habits of thought and belief within the poet’s extensive and varied writings and through his celebrated conversions and repudiations, literary and otherwise. Hecht acknowledges that Auden’s poems “both invite the intrusive scrutiny of the cryptographer and deny him access.” Yet the readings he offers of poems from every phase of Auden’s career, along with dramatic works and critical essays, manage to explicate and illuminate Auden’s rich (and often cryptic) allusiveness without murdering to dissect.Among the themes that connect Auden’s works are his deep interest in the workings of language; his notion of the ultimate frivolity of art; his interest in the nature of heroism; his understanding of the relation of public to private life; the development of his religious thought; and what Auden called the “hidden law” that governs human existence – a strict and retaliatory force, something like poetic justice, that gives form to our best literature and shapes our personal fates.Hecht identifies these preoccupations in Auden’s work – and shows how they cut across the many genres in which he wrote – without losing sight of each poem’s individual history and context. As one of Auden’s most distinguished poetic heirs, Anthony Hecht is uniquely qualified to illuminate both the reading and the writing of these essential works of twentieth-century literature.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Library Journal Hecht, a recognized authority on Auden and one of our finest poets and critics ( The Transparent Man, LJ 6/15/90; Obbligati, LJ 8/86) , here offers a superbly crafted paean to Auden’s poetry. He reads Auden’s poems chronologically in order to demonstrate the relationship between Auden’s life and art. Such readings not only reveal prominent motifs and themes–the notion of art as frivolity, the idea of heroism, the dichotomy of public world/private self, the centrality of language, the Hidden Law, a kind of poetic justice that governs literature and life–but also demonstrate influences on Auden, which included Kierkegaard, Rimbaud, Eliot, and Hardy. One wishes that Hecht had done a better job of citing his sources, but this is a minor weakness given the insights he generates from his readings of “New Year Letter” and “For the Time Being.” The respect for Auden’s art, evident in Hecht’s lucid prose and gracious readings, makes this book a fine introduction to Auden’s work. Highly recommended.- Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., OhioCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Review This is a book about poetry, about a poet who was dedicated to the art like few others of our time, whose poetic technique only another poet as gifted as Hecht could gloss…The richness of reference in this book to history, prosody, theology, poetry, punctuation, makes for a long swim in the heady liquor of poetry–not only Auden’s poetry but that of the hundreds of authors whom Auden read…It is a pleasure to read. (Peter Davison Atlantic)I know of no other instance of a poet of comparable mastery of his art and his experience taking up in such loving detail the work of a predecessor (and near contemporary). (Richard Howard Washington Post Book World)The Hidden Law’s dispassionate critical voice unfolds a powerful meditation on the vicissitudes of the poetic life…It is at its most significant level a narrative of Anthony Hecht’s emergence as a poet, and for all that the book tells us by implication, it takes its place alongside MacNeice’s Yeats and Berryman’s Crane. (Nicholas Jenkins Times Literary Supplement) Review A work of the most keen-sighted love for the most keen-sighted poet of our century. (Joseph Brodsky) Read more

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