The high artistry of Anthony Hecht has been to nurture his own gift, and to work at it with the deliberateness and steadiness that it deserved from him. A Summoning of Stones (1954) and The Hard Hours (1967) have now been joined by Millions of Strange Shadows…. Emotional intensity and formal power were combined in Hecht from his beginnings; if there has been a deepening in so elegant and grave an art, it has been in the release of a humor gentler than the initial ironies of apprehension that Hecht once cultivated. The 30 poems in Hecht's new book are all fully written, but several truly are the best he has published and are very likely to endure. The very best is "Green: An Epistle," which is a lesson in profound, controlled subjectivity and self-revelation, an exact antithesis to the opaque squalors of "confessional" poets. Almost equally remarkable are "Coming Home...