Anthony Hecht, widely regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century, died yesterday at 81 in Washington D.C., according to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. He had suffered from lymphoma. A poet who wrote as easily in Old Testament tones as the lightest of verse, Hecht wrote often of death. Lines from his poem “Death the Poet” (1996) were engraved on the walls of his library and could serve as his own epitaph:

Those grand authorial earth shakers
Who brought such gladness to the eyes
Of the knowing and unworldly-wise
In damasked language long ago?
Call them and nobody replies.
Et nunc in pulvere dormio.
And now they sleep in dust.

Hecht was above all a poet in a moral universe, searching constantly for what could be known, what trusted in a world rent by war and restored by peace, what qualified as prudence and right. In a career that lasted for than five decades – his last published poem was “Aubade” in the October 21, 2004, issue of the New York Review of Books – he created a poetry of lyrical beauty informed by the long tradition of the West.

Think of the glittering morning when God’s peace Flooded the heavens as it withdrew the tide: Sweet grasses, endless fields of such rich peace That for long after, when men dreamed of peace It seemed a place where beast and human grace A pastoral landscape, a Virgilian peace,

Or scene such as Mantegna’s masterpiece
Of kneeling shepherds. But that dream has grown
Threadbare, improbable, and our paupers groan
While “stockpiled warheads guarantee our peace,”
And troops, red-handed, muscle in for the close.
Ours is a wound that bleeds and will not close.
(from “Canzone”)

Hecht was a New York native, the first son of Melvyn Hahlo and Dorothea Hecht. He had what he called an unhappy childhood in the city: His father was a stockbroker whose finances were often shaky, and his brother was often ill. Yet he came to know and love the city’s culture.

“The first kind of art that I really instantly recognized and reacted to … was classical music, which I heard on WQXR in New York City,” he told The New York Sun last year. “I was brought up near the Metropolitan Museum, so it was easy to go there. And I received an education there.” For his more formal education he attended the Collegiate School and two other schools in New York City and went on to study at Bard College. During World War II, Hecht fought in the 97th Infantry Division in France, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. War is a constant theme in his poetry.

Hecht’s memories of his wartime experience influenced such poems as “Sacrifice,” “More Light! More Light!,” and “The Book of Yolek.” Later he would travel extensively in Europe, whose cities – especially the Italian cities – he captured in many of his poems: “The Venetian Vespers,” “A Roman Holiday,” “Rome,” “See Naples and Die,” “A Hill,” and numerous others.

He resumed studies under the G.I. bill at Kenyon College, where he worked under John Crowe Ransom, William Empson, and Allen Tate. Ransom, as editor of the Kenyon Review, published some of Hecht’s earliest poems. Hecht was later associated with the Hudson Review, where he served on the editorial board for a time.

Hecht won the Prix de Rome in 1951, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1965, and the Bollingen Prize in 1983. He was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1954 and 1959. He was a professor of English at Georgetown University from 1985 to 1999. He was also a chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets.

Hecht was married twice, first to Patricia Harris, by whom he had two sons, then to Helen D’Alessandro, by whom he had one. In his later life, Hecht split his time between New York and Washington.