Collected Earlier Poems

Anthony Hecht (1923-2004) was born in New York. His first book of poems, A Summoning of Stones, appeared in 1954, and his second book, The Hard Hours, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1968. Millions of Strange Shadows was published in 1977, followed by The Venetian Vespers in 1979. All of these are included here in Collected Earlier Poems (the first in selected forms). His later volumes, The Transparent Man (1990), Flight Among the Tombs (1996), and The Darkness and the Light (2001) are gathered in Collected Later Poems (2003). He was also the author of a study of the poetry of W. H. Auden, The Hidden Law (1993), as well as several collections of critical essays, including Melodies Unheard: Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry (2003). Among other honors, he received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, the Librex-Guggenheim Eugenio Montale Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Robert Frost Medal. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.