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COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Illinois Press
By Anthony Hecht. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. pp. xi+484. $35.
It is true enough, as Auden's most quoted line has it, that poetry makes nothing happen. But who would want it any other way? Auden believed that if a text accosts its readers with an enforced message, especially a carefully hidden one, then little has been gained: the audience remains as impressionably dependent as before. But if a text can make nothing happen, it can draw its readers into a more acute awareness of how they actually read, and it can alter habituated and often destructive patterns of response. By making nothing happen, poetry can shift the interpretive procedures that precede and guide human choice.
Unfortunately, Anthony Hecht fails to grasp any of this. His initial gesture in The Hidden Law is to set himself up as a...
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