Volume 33, Number 2 · February 13, 1986
Poet for a Dark Age
By Brad Leithauser
BOOKS BY ANTHONY HECHT DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
A Summoning of Stones
by Anthony Hecht
Atheneum, (out of print)
The Hard Hours
by Anthony Hecht
Atheneum, 103 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Millions of Strange Shadows
by Anthony Hecht
Atheneum, 75 pp., $4.95 (paper)
The Venetian Vespers
by Anthony Hecht
Atheneum, 91 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Even while we are hoping that Elizabeth Bishop was wrong in evaluating ours as the 'worst century so far,' and that future historians will look more gently upon the scrambling lives we lived under the gathering clouds of the third millennium, hers is a judgment that many of us—and perhaps most writers—share. How obvious it sounds, and how complex it makes our existence: we perceive ourselves as the inhabitants of a dark age. When future literary historians examine us (with the assistance, no doubt, of technological marvels that will make our own newly emergent computerized concordances and statistical studies look very primitive indeed), they may well choose to begin their analyses with this perception.
Review, 3227 words
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