Life & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Hecht

Hecht treats difficulty not as a gatekeeping device but as the point of entry: the “fun” is in the chase, in letting a poem resist you long enough to earn its surrender. The phrasing is slyly anti-romantic. “Penetrate the mystery” sounds almost like a detective’s boast, then he undercuts it with a practical, almost musical instruction: say the lines “again and again.” Hecht is arguing for repetition as a tool of perception, the way practicing scales trains your ear to hear relationships you’d otherwise miss.

The key move is the paradoxical middle stage, when the poem starts to “sound like nonsense.” That’s not failure; it’s a reset. Repeating language until it temporarily empties out is how you break the grip of first impressions, habitual meanings, and the ego’s impatience to “get it.” In cognitive terms, you’re stripping the words of their automatic associations so you can rebuild them with attention. In poetic terms, you’re letting sound, syntax, and rhythm reassert themselves as meaning-makers, not just carriers of paraphrase.

Context matters: Hecht is a formalist with a traumatic twentieth-century biography, a poet shaped by war and by a deep suspicion of easy sincerity. The subtext is a defense of artifice and re-reading in an era that often confuses immediacy with authenticity. Hecht offers a demanding pleasure: the poem as an instrument that only plays clearly once you’ve trained your ear, and once you’ve consented to be baffled on purpose.