Balancing the personal and impersonal …

… Patrick Kurp on The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht | Quarterly Conversation. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Hecht witnessed death in combat as an infantryman in Europe, and as a member of the 97th division he helped liberate the death camp at Flossenbürg. Two weeks earlier, on April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been hanged there. Hecht was assigned to interview surviving French prisoners, and decades later he told an interviewer: “The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking.” Jonathan F.S. Post, the editor of Selected Letters, includes more than twenty letters written while Hecht was on active duty, but all are silent on the subject of the atrocities he witnessed. Post says “an element of official wartime censorship is operating,” but one suspects Hecht found his experiences defied language. Only decades later, in poems and interviews, could he articulate the shrieking.