Abstract
This essay considers Anthony Hecht’s Holocaust poetry. Drawing from his own experiences as a GI liberating the Flossenburg concentration camp, Anthony Hecht crafted a number of intricate, challenging metrical forms—including sestina, ballad, and rhyming forms borrowed from Renaissance metaphysical poetry—in order to consider what he called “the contemplation of horror.” Hecht’s Holocaust poetry frequently describes monuments of Western culture in close proximity to the camps. His deft use of sophisticated, historical forms similarly foregrounds the question of how a culture produced such refinement and barbarity. His mastery of the forms both honors and indicts the culture that produced them.
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Caplan, D. (2020). “At Last to a Condition of Dignity”: Anthony Hecht’s Holocaust Poetry. In: Aarons, V., Lassner, P. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33428-4_19
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