19 pages • 38 minutes read
Anthony HechtLot's Wife
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Lot’s Wife” by Wisława Szymborska (1975)
Polish poet, essayist, and translator Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012) infused her poems with a simplicity that, like “Lot’s Wife,” is deceptive. Her acute examination of humanity resulted in her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. In her own version of Lot's wife’s story, Szymborska gives voice to Lot’s wife by using the first-person perspective of a woman fleeing destruction. Confusion abounds: There’s dust everywhere, rodents and insects scurry away from the fires, and Lot’s wife’s mind is also in turmoil as she recalls her hometown. She honestly doesn’t know which way she faces, and she imagines her disorientation looks like “dancing” (Line 41). In other words, her looking back seems like a flippant act of defiance. Like Hecht, Szymborska suggests that there’s far more to Lot’s wife’s action of looking back than traditional narratives suggest.
“The End and the Beginning” by Wisława Szymborska (1993)
Published in Szymborska’s collection of the same name, the poem functions like Hecht’s and Szymborska’s “Lot’s Wife” in depicting atrocities, memory, and human morality in a deceptively simple manner. People return to their routines after a devastating war, while some idle about. The poem shows how violence and trauma follow people regardless of a major event ending. In this reading, Lot’s actions after his wife dies and his city is destroyed might be symptoms of trauma.
“Lot’s Wife” by Anna Akhmatova (1961)
Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) was born in Odessa, Ukraine. She was a major poet beloved by the Russian people. In a sense, she lived through much of what these poems about Lot’s wife detail. One of her ex-husbands died in a Siberian labor camp, while the Bolsheviks executed another. Akhmatova faced an official ban on her work from 1925 until 1940. Her son Levi was later arrested and jailed. Akhmatova, however, did not abandon her country, but her experience with loss and repression during the Stalinist regime helped flesh out Lot’s wife’s plight in her poem.
Akhmatova’s speaker situates Lot’s wife in a similar role to Szymborska’s speaker, though Akhmatova doesn’t use the first-person perspective. Like Hecht and Szymborska, Akhmatova infuses the poem with memories of a life lived. The speaker admits that, like biblical narratives, Lot’s wife is a minor character. This “insignificant” (Line 14) woman, the speaker finally says, still deserves recognition.
Further Literary Resources
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time) by Marcel Proust (1917-1923)
Hecht includes Proust (1871-1922) in his poem, referencing the French writer’s epic search for meaning in his seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time. The speaker in “Lot’s Wife” points out that the microscopic details of memory on display in the poem are recollections that Proust, who also loved details, would cherish. The two works also query the pros and cons of looking back, and how others view this act of looking.
“Lot’s Wife: Midrash and Aggadah” by Tamar Kadari (1999)
This entry in the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women from the Jewish Women’s Archive details the story of Idit. Idit is the name given to Lot’s wife in this account of Lot’s story. Idit doesn’t want to host the angels her husband brings home. She complains about this while gathering salt from her neighbors to feed the guests. It’s suggested that her gossiping directly causes the neighbors to know of the guests’ whereabouts and later demand the guests come outside for sexual liaisons.
“The morality of Anthony Hecht” by David Yezzi (2004)
Published in The New Criterion, Yezzi’s article investigates Hecht’s role in Formalism. Yezzi suggests the focus on Formalism does a great disservice to Hecht’s poetics because his work focuses more on morality—or the lack thereof—than on form. Yezzi positions Hecht as a public poet in the vein of Auden, one who uses universal morality to critique tragedy, spiritual morality, and the fallen state of humankind.
“Aesthetic Transfiguration: ‘Monkey Boy’” by Anthony Domestico (2021)
This article in Commonweal doesn’t address Hecht or his poetry directly, but it does compare the act of using memory and past tense in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to the use of past tense in Madame Bovary. Proust uses the tense to indicate repeated actions in the past, while the tense in Flaubert’s work underscores “the deadening effect of actions that repeat and never change.” The writer then compares Proust’s use to the novel Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman.
Hecht also uses the act of memory similar to Proust. Though it doesn’t function grammatically as the novels in this article, the article helps flesh out Proust’s concerns with memory and recollection. This understanding of Proust’s preoccupations can help readers better understand Hecht’s own thematic concerns and his decision to include Proust in “Lot’s Wife.”
