Melodies Unheard

Anthony Hecht's vast knowledge of literature and his gift for mesmerizing argument are both amply present in Melodies Unheard. Whether defending the sestina against accusations of boredom and dolefulness or examining the structure of Shakespeare's sonnets or unraveling some of the complexity of Moby-Dick, these essays are models of civility, candor, and grace. I know of no other poet, certainly none of Anthony Hecht's stature, who sheds as much light on the intricacies and hidden designs of poems and who does it with such style.

Anthony Hecht declares himself 'a poet first and only secondarily a critic,' but Melodies Unheard proves again that he is a master in both trades. His discourse on such subjects as rhyme, the sestina, and 'the music of forms' is both scholarly and delightful; his articles on individual poets are finely done; and best of all, perhaps, are his penetrating treatments of particular poems—his reading of Bishop's 'The Man-Moth,' for instance, his biographical placement of Frost's 'The Wood-Pile,' his discussion of emotional paradox in Hopkins's 'The Wreck of the Deutschland.' When Hecht goes beyond the preserve of poetry, as in his forceful pieces on Moby-Dick and St. Paul, it is always a splendid bonus.

Unheard melodies may be sweeter, as Keats writes, but in the essays of another masterful poet and thinker about poetry, Anthony Hecht, we find it delicious to be listening as if for the first time. No reader of Hecht's dazzling essays on rhyme, on the sestina, or on Shakespeare's sonnets, will fail to hear a fine-tuned music. Hecht's characteristically original leaps of association among the arts also ensure that we can visualize the heretofore unobserved kinship of Sir Philip Sidney and Jean-Antoine Watteau, or of Elizabeth Bishop and Hieronymous Bosch. Here is a book to be seen and heard in the mind long after we close it.