Life & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Hecht

A good poet, Hecht suggests, is less a lone genius than a walking archive. The line flatters memory, but it also quietly demotes “inspiration” to something more like retrieval: the real work happens because the poet has already stocked the mind with rhythms, images, forms, and voices that can be summoned on demand. “At the beck and call” is telling. It turns memory into a kind of disciplined servant, implying craft, repetition, and training rather than mystical lightning bolts. You don’t just feel your way into a poem; you draw from an internal shelf system built over years of reading.

The subtext is also a mild rebuke to the contemporary romance of originality. Hecht isn’t arguing for imitation, exactly. He’s arguing that originality is parasitic on intimacy with what came before. A “mental library” is not a museum; it’s a working reference desk. When a poet reaches for a line break, a cadence, an inherited form, it’s often because earlier poems have laid down grooves in the ear. If you don’t have those grooves, you can’t even hear what your own draft is failing to do.

Context matters here: Hecht, a formalist with a fierce ear and a deep investment in tradition, wrote in a postwar literary culture that often framed “newness” as virtue and “allusion” as elitism. This sentence defends the old bargain: reading widely isn’t decoration, it’s equipment. The poem on the page is the visible tip; beneath it sits a private anthology, humming, ready to be activated.