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David
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Anthony Hecht’s Barren Places:
"The Feast of Stephen" and the American Sonnet
"The Feast of Stephen" and the American Sonnet
Anthony Hecht wrote relatively few traditional sonnets—only three appear in his two Collected volumes (not counting a double sonnet, two translations, and some uncollected work). Widely touted for his prosodic mastery, Hecht more often than not chose the unrhymed fourteener over the rhyming Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. Clearly, Hecht had no objection to rhyme itself, extolling its uses in his essay “On Rhyme.” He employed it for particular effects—frequently in elaborate, Donnean stanzas—or left it out entirely, as in his longer dramatic monologues.
Included in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, Hecht’s “The Feast of Stephen” comprises four blank-verse fourteeners. The unrhymed form of the sonnet is common in contemporary poetry, and one might even argue that it is an American innovation. But why would a poet with a deep appreciation of rhyme and an obvious facility for it choose to write sonnets without it? What are the effects he wished to create?
Each of the poem’s numbered sections stands alone, while contributing something essential to the whole. Each “sonnet” takes a different rhetorical tack—from the discursive to the dramatic. (Hecht elaborates on the sonnet’s dramatic potential in his introduction to The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the Sonnets.) Hecht’s poem confronts evil—violence, torture, murder—in its ancient and contemporary manifestations, offering within the aesthetic space of the blank-verse sonnet a suite of “barren places,” akin to Frost’s “desert places” and recalling Auden’s “plane without a feature.”
Included in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English, Hecht’s “The Feast of Stephen” comprises four blank-verse fourteeners. The unrhymed form of the sonnet is common in contemporary poetry, and one might even argue that it is an American innovation. But why would a poet with a deep appreciation of rhyme and an obvious facility for it choose to write sonnets without it? What are the effects he wished to create?
Each of the poem’s numbered sections stands alone, while contributing something essential to the whole. Each “sonnet” takes a different rhetorical tack—from the discursive to the dramatic. (Hecht elaborates on the sonnet’s dramatic potential in his introduction to The New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the Sonnets.) Hecht’s poem confronts evil—violence, torture, murder—in its ancient and contemporary manifestations, offering within the aesthetic space of the blank-verse sonnet a suite of “barren places,” akin to Frost’s “desert places” and recalling Auden’s “plane without a feature.”
David Yezzi’s latest books of poetry are Birds of the Air and Black Sea (both in the Carnegie Mellon Poets Series) and the verse play Schnauzer (Exot Books). He teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and edits The Hopkins Review.