ANTHONY HECHT'S CONTROLLED DISORDER

Abstract

6 2 Y A N T H O N Y H E C H T ’ S C O N T R O L L E D D I S O R D E R F L O R I A N G A R G A I L L O For thus it was designed: Controlled disorder at the heart Of everything, the paradox, the old Oxymoronic itch to set the formal strictures Within a natural context, where the tension lectures Us on our moral state, and by controlled Disorder, labors to keep art From being too refined. – Anthony Hecht, ‘‘The Gardens of the Villa d’Este’’ When critics talk about the purported self-containment of midcentury American verse, they often point to Anthony Hecht’s ‘‘The Gardens of the Villa d’Este,’’ from A Summoning of Stones (1954), as their chief example. The poem, it is said, turns away from the historical realities of postwar Europe in order to focus on its own artistic designs. Hecht is thus believed to o√er a vision of art as controlled and hermetic, the Italian villa he depicts simply a metaphor for the poem and the poet’s work. While most admit that his later books, starting with The Hard Hours in 1967, take up a range of historical subjects, Hecht’s early writing has been seen – 6 3 R is still widely seen – as all poetry qua poetry: the principles of New Criticism applied. This argument has been as longstanding as it has been pervasive . To give a few examples, starting with the most recent: Edward Brunner, in his Cold War Poetry (2004), says of ‘‘The Gardens of the Villa d’Este’’ that it is ‘‘quintessential academic verse’’ typical of Hecht and of the 1950s more generally. ‘‘By demonstrating a poetry complicitous with the New Criticism,’’ he writes, ‘‘Hecht’s work exemplified that moment of high civilization of which the Villa d’Este is a supreme example.’’ Daniel Ho√man, in The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (1979), likewise asserts that ‘‘Hecht’s poem is an exploration of the aesthetic bequest of Europe, not of the terror or pity history had exacted in such places during the recent war.’’ We might go even farther back to one of Hecht’s earliest reviewers, Louise Bogan, who in 1954 wrote enthusiastically about his first book of poems while asserting these same distinctions: Hecht, born in 1923, served as an infantry rifleman in Europe and Asia. He was awarded, in 1951, a writing fellowship to the American Academy at Rome. The second experience has evidently been more important in his poetic development than the first; he draws more freely upon the Italian scene than upon any background of war. And his verbal and technical brilliance is directed toward the celebration, rather than the dissection, of what he has felt and observed. The commentaries on this poem are not all pejorative, but many are (Brunner’s ‘‘complicitous’’ suggests a vague conspiracy between Hecht and the New Critics), and many others at least imply that the young poet’s vision was narrowed by his indi√erence toward history, even if he is not to be censured for it. What I would like to do is argue against this common view of ‘‘The Gardens of the Villa d’Este.’’ I think we have done Hecht’s early writing – and by extension, midcentury poetry – a disservice by speaking of them in terms of self-containment. Instead of turning away from the world, his poem considers deeply the historical pressures that weigh down on the artist’s work. What’s more, Hecht makes a vigorous case for the artist’s need to reckon with these same forces, rather than ignore them. 6 4 G A R G A I L L O Y I base this reading both on verbal details I think have been insu≈ciently attended to, and on historical facts about the Villa itself that Hecht’s critics have yet to bring up in discussions of the poem. This latter point seems to me a peculiar oversight considering the impact that World War II had on Hecht’s imagining of the gardens...