"Once Removed" and "To a Soldier Killed in Germany", were published in The Kenyon Review. Later that year, he suffered a nervous breakdown and returned to his parents' home in New York City and entered psychoanalysis. In 1948, his poems begin to appear in The Hudson Review, Poetry, and Furioso. He later won the Furioso Poetry Award and enrolled at Columbia University as a candidate for a master's degree in English literature. Hecht released his first collection, A Summoning of Stones, in 1954. Even at this stage Hecht's poetry was often compared with that of W. H. Auden, with whom Hecht had become friends in 1951 during a holiday on the Italian island of Ischia, where Auden spent each summer. In 1993 Hecht published The Hidden Law, a critical reading of Auden's body of work. In his second book, The Hard Hours, Hecht first addressed his own experiences of World War II – memories that had caused him to have a nervous breakdown in 1959. Hecht spent three months in hospital following his breakdown, although he was spared electric shock therapy, unlike Sylvia Plath, whom he had encountered while teaching at Smith College. Hecht's main source of income was as a teacher of poetry, most notably at the University of Rochester, where he taught from 1967 to 1985. He also spent varying lengths of time teaching at other notable institutions such as Smith, Bard, Harvard, Georgetown, and Yale. Between 1982 and 1984, he held the esteemed position of Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Hecht won a number of literary awards including: the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for The Hard Hours), the 1983 Bollingen Prize, the 1988 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 1989 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the 1997 Wallace Stevens Award, the 1999/2000 Frost Medal, and the Tanning Prize. Hecht died on October 20, 2004, at his home in Washington, D. C.; he is buried at the cemetery at Bard College. One month later, on November 17, Hecht was awarded the National Medal of Arts, accepted on his behalf by his wife, Helen Hecht. The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize is awarded annually by the Waywiser Press. Literary style, inspirations, and themes Hecht is known for his masterful use of traditional forms and linguistic control. Extraordinarily erudite, his verse often features allusions to French literature, Greek myth, and tragedy, and English poets