The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden

✍ Scribed by Anthony Hecht

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1993
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 496
• Edition: Reprint 2014
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

A work of the most keen-sighted love for the most keen-sighted poet of our century.

The Hidden Law's dispassionate critical voice unfolds a powerful meditation on the vicissitudes of the poetic life...It is at its most significant level a narrative of Anthony Hecht's emergence as a poet, and for all that the book tells us by implication, it takes its place alongside MacNeice's Yeats and Berryman's Crane.

I know of no other instance of a poet of comparable mastery of his art and his experience taking up in such loving detail the work of a predecessor (and near contemporary).

This is a book about poetry, about a poet who was dedicated to the art like few others of our time, whose poetic technique only another poet as gifted as Hecht could gloss...The richness of reference in this book to history, prosody, theology, poetry, punctuation, makes for a long swim in the heady liquor of poetry--not only Auden's poetry but that of the hundreds of authors whom Auden read...It is a pleasure to read.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Preface
I. Everything That Counts Is Well Veiled: Poems
II. The Curative Power of Love: On This Island
III. Poetry Makes Nothing Happen: Another Time
IV. A Sort of Practical Holiday: Letter to Lord Byron
V. A Civitas of Sound: New Year Letter
VI. God Will Cheat No One: For the Time Being
VII. Amor Loci: Nones
VIII. In Solitude, for Company: The Shield of Achilles
IX. The Hidden Law
Acknowledgments
Index of Auden’s Works
General Index