Anthony Hecht Quotations

Poetry operates by hints and dark suggestions. It is full of secrets and hidden formulae, like a witch's brew.

Children know from a remarkably early age that things are being kept from them, that grown-ups participate in a world of mysteries.

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

Mysteries, like the Masonic rites, are ones parents and elders are sworn not to reveal to the uninitiated, which include all children. And so we sought for signs.

It doesn't seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

Mandelstam's wife committed all his poems to memory in fear that both he and his poems would be destroyed by Stalin.

Merely to have survived is not an index of excellence.

It doesnt seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.

I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order.

Brilliant. [Lasdun] seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid, and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous. His capacities are solidly established; his promise is nearly infinite.

If the heart has its reasons, perhaps the body Has its own lumbering sort of carnal spirit, Felt in the tingling bruises of collision, And known to captains as esprit de corps.

I look and look, / As though I could be saved simply by looking

These questions absorbed me at an age when I was supposed to be getting down the rudimentary facts of American history, which I carelessly neglected.