Narrative has always been the conscience of Anthony Hecht's poetry. He is an instinctive decorator, a court jeweller among wordsmiths, who from time to time submits himself to a bare narration. Bare, because the facts are beyond the aid of artifice. They are narratives of atrocity, the flaying alive of the Emperor Valerian, the stoning of Stephen, or, most particularly, the persecution of the Jews throughout history, culminating in the concentration camps. It is as if the power of invention, the skill and the delight in artifice, is a gift that could be used in any way at all; whereas narrative is a vocation, a moral imperative, that determines how the gift is to be used….

Hecht has explored … ambivalence and sought to harness the opposing attractions within a poetry that can contain them both….

Hecht is at his best in exploring the contrariness of the soul's attractions...