Hecht's opening essays on the sonnet are brilliant, though they may repeat each other a little too much to be placed sequentially. Both are principally concerned with Shakespeare's sonnets: close readings in the first and thoughts about form and sex in the second. About the latter in the former, Hecht invokes Auden:
In the process of composition, as every poet knows, the relation between experience and language is always dialectical, but in the finished product it must always appear to the reader to be a one-way relationship. In serious poetry thought, emotion, event, must always appear to dictate the diction, meter, and rhyme in which they are embodied; vice versa, in comic poetry it is the words, meter, rhyme, which must appear to create the thoughts emotions, and events they require.
Hecht says it "almost indisputable" that Auden is right in that passage, and it accords with my own experience reworking a whole boatload of sonnets just recently — and in reading George Starbuck and Don Paterson. More on that later.
Hecht quotes Auden frequently in what I've read of the book, and not always to agree — he convincingly demolishes Auden's high opinion of Falstaff. But it's this, mentioned in the introduction, that I think I most need to learn for this blog: "Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered." It's no secret who I think will be forgotten. I'm going to concentrate on those I think should be remembered.
5:51:37 PM 
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