Rites and Ceremonies

The American formalist poet, literary critic, and professor Anthony Hecht was born into a German Jewish family in New York City. During his service in the U.S. Army, he helped liberate the Flossenbürg concentration camp (April 1945), an experience that informed much of his writing. He published seven volumes of poetry during his lifetime, characterized by their command of traditional forms and controlled language. His best-known and most highly regarded works date from the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with The Hard Hours (1967), these works created unsettling juxtapositions between the formal structure of his poetry and their subject matter: explorations of the darkness of human nature based on his experiences in World War II. Hecht’s work was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (1968), the Bollingen Prize (1983), and the Academy of American Poets Tanning Prize for lifetime achievement (1997). From 1982 to 1984, he was the poet laureate consultant at the Library of Congress.