Appreciation …

… Hieratic Hecht, by Adam Kirsch | The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What makes Late Romance an exemplary literary biography is the way Yezzi—a poet and a former editor of The New Criterion who now teaches at Johns Hopkins—connects Hecht’s aesthetic ideals with his personality and experiences. If Hecht flourished in his chosen “hieratic tradition” while others chafed against it, he did so because, as Yezzi writes, he “discovered in language the ‘hidden law’ that bestows an implicit order on the world, without which, like Lear, ‘we shall go mad.’” For Hecht, madness wasn’t just a Shakespearean allusion, but an ever-present possibility, and his best poems rely on formal strictness to contain an intimate knowledge of chaos and evil.