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A prominent figure in contemporary American literature, James Dickey is best known for his intense exploration of the primal, irrational, creative, and ordering forces in life. Often classified as a visionary Romantic in the tradition of Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, and Theodore Roethke, Dickey emphasizes the primacy of imagination and examines the relationship between humanity and nature.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

Early Awareness of Death Born in Buckhead, Georgia, an affluent community then on the outskirts of Atlanta, on February 2, 1923, James Lafayette Dickey, the second son of lawyer Eugene Dickey and Maibelle Swift Dickey, grew up with the knowledge that he was a ”replacement child” for Eugene Jr., a brother who had died of meningitis. This early awareness of the relationship between death and life, reinforced by his combat experiences in early adulthood, contributed to his later poetic theme of living the energized life.

From Athletics to Academics

Dickey’s high-school interests centered on athletics, particularly football and track. After graduating from North Fulton High in 1941, he attended Darlington School in Rome, Georgia, from 1941 to 1942. While he was there, in December 1941, the United States entered World War II. In the fall of 1942, he entered Clemson A&M (now Clemson University) where he played tailback on the freshman football squad, but at the end of his first semester he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. From 1943 to 1945, he participated in approximately one hundred combat missions as a member of the 418th Night Fighter Squadron in the South Pacific.

After the war, Dickey enrolled at Vanderbilt University. This change in schools marked his shift in interest from athletics to academics. At Vanderbilt, Dickey soon came to the attention of English professor Monroe Spears, who recognized his student’s literary talent and guided him to major in English and philosophy and minor in astronomy. On November 4, 1948 Dickey married Maxine Syerson, with whom he would have two sons, Christopher and Kevin. In 1949, Dickey earned a BA degree in English, graduating magna cum laude. Then, in 1950, he received his MA. His thesis for the latter was titled ”Symbol and Image in the Short Poems of Herman Melville.”

Dickey began his teaching career at Rice Institute in September 1950, but four months later he was recalled to active military duty, in the training command of the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. After completing his military obligations, he returned to Rice and began making journal entries toward a novel that thirty-six years later he would publish as Alnilam (1987).

Advertising Career and Poetry Accolades

In 1954, Dickey received a Sewanee Review Fellowship, with which he traveled to Europe and concentrated on writing poetry. A year later, he moved to the University of Florida where, with the help of novelist and historian Andrew Lytle, he had obtained a teaching appointment. He resigned this position, however, in the spring of 1956, following a controversy arising from his reading of his poem ”The Father’s Body.” Dickey then left Florida for New York; there he established himself in a successful advertising career, first as a copywriter and later as an executive with McCann-Erickson. During the next three years, Dickey was associated with a series of advertising agencies. He eventually returned to Atlanta where he created advertisements for such companies as Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines.

While writing ad copy, Dickey also added to his growing list of poetry publications and awards. In 1958, he received the Union League’s Civic and Arts Foundation Prize from the Union League Club of Chicago for poems published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. A year later, he won the Vachel Lindsay Prize and the Longview Foundation Award. A collection of his poetry was published as Into the Stone and Other Poems with work by Jon Swan and Paris Leary in Poets of Today VII (1960), and the following year he permanently abandoned his career in advertising. During 1961-1962 a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed Dickey to travel to Positano, Italy, where he composed Drowning with Others (1962).

Poet-in-Residence

Dickey returned to the United States in 1962 and spent the next four years as a poet-in-residence at such schools as Reed College (1963-1964), San Fernando Valley State College (1964-1965), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1966). His collection Helmets appeared in 1964, and his recognition as a poet was heightened when he received the 1966 National Book Award for Buckdancer’s Choice (1965), the Melville Cane Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Between 1966 and 1968 Dickey served as consultant in poetry for the Library of Congress. During that time his Poems 1957 1967 (1967) and his collection of reviews and essays Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now (1968) were published. In 1968, he was appointed poet-in-residence at the University of South Carolina, but because of contractual requirements with the Library of Congress, he did not begin his teaching position until the fall of 1969. In 1970, he was named First Carolina Professor of English at the University of South Carolina.

Dickey lived in Columbia, South Carolina, and taught at the University of South Carolina from 1969 to 1997. In this setting he produced many of his major works, including his popularly and critically acclaimed first novel, Deliverance. In this harrowing novel, four middle-aged city-dwellers take a weekend canoe trip that turns into a transforming encounter with violence. Dickey also wrote the screenplay, suggested the musical theme “Duellin’ Banjos,” and acted the role of Sheriff Bullard in the Academy Award-nominated 1972 Warner Brothers movie based on his novel. Other major Dickey works appearing during the early to mid-1970s were a poetry collection, The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970); two books on writing and the creative process, Self-Interviews (1970) and Sorties (1971); and a long poem, The Zodiac (1976).

Writing for Jimmy Carter

Dickey’s first wife, Maxine, died in 1976, and that same year he married Deborah Dodson, with whom he had a daughter, Bronwen. Jimmy Carter invited Dickey to write and read a poem for the 1977 inaugural celebration in Washington, D.C. ”The Strength of Fields,” the poem Dickey wrote for that occasion, served as the title poem of his 1979 collection. The Strength of Fields was followed in 1982 by Puella, one of Dickey’s most experimental poetry volumes, and in 1987 by Alnilam, his most ambitious novel. On May 18, 1988

Dickey was inducted into the fifty-member American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1989 he was selected a judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, a clear indication of his continuing importance to and influence on American writers.

An Energetic Writer

In his seventies, Dickey remained a prolific, energetic writer: he produced his final collection of poetry, The Eagle’s Mile (1990), and his third novel, To the White Sea (1993). From November 1994 to his death in early 1997, Dickey endured serious health problems but continued writing and conducting classes at the University of South Carolina. He taught his last class on January 14 and on the following day was hospitalized for the last time. At the time of his death he was at work on Crux, a novel set during World War II, and was oversee ing preliminary work on a movie adaptation of his novel To the White Sea.

Works in Literary Context

James Dickey frequently describes confrontations in war, sports, and nature as means for probing violence, mortality, creativity, and social values. In his poetry, Dickey rejects formalism, artifice, and confession, and instead favors a narrative mode that features energetic rhythms and charged emotions. Dickey has stated that in his poetry he attempts to achieve ”a kind of plain-speaking line in which astonishing things can be said without rhetorical emphasis. In addition to his verse, Dickey has authored the acclaimed novels Deliverance (1970) and Alnilam (1987), symbolic works that explore extremes of human behavior. His works show the influence of Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, James Agee, and the Fugitive Agrarians, a Southern literary group centered around Vanderbilt University.

The Horrors of War

Dickey’s war poetry, also introduced in his first three collections, further expands his complex relationship to the dead, particularly as a combat survivor. He senses that he has been given a second opportunity for life, that he has been singled out for a special purpose, but that he cannot fully escape the immersion in death to which war has subjected him. The stages in the process of moving from painful memories to a renewal of life are constant in Dickey s war poetry. His speakers first manifest self-lacerating anguish brought on by the harrowing combat deaths they have witnessed. They confront the horrors of war through detailed re-creations of combat memories: ”The Performance in Into the Stone and ”Between Two Prisoners in Drowning with Others are two well-known early examples of the dramatically re-created scene. Finally, Dickey s speakers come to terms with their experiences with death, as in ”The Firebombing,” collected in Two Poems of the Air (1964), and Buckdancer’s Choice. This process of experiencing anguish, conjuring up the horrors that have produced this anguish, and reordering their understanding of their war experiences becomes the basis for his protagonists’ renewal to life.

Throughout his career as poet and novelist, Dickey drove himself to fulfill Ezra Pound’s dictum to ”make it new.” Because his works are not only ”new” but also compelling and engaging, James Dickey will be remembered as one of the most important literary voices in America.

Works in Critical Context

James Dickey was widely regarded as a major American poet because of what critics and readers identified as his unique vision and style. ”It is clear,” said Joyce Carol Oates in her New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1978), ”that Dickey desires to take on ‘his’ own personal history as an analogue to or a microscopic exploration of twentieth-century American history, which is one of the reasons he is so important a poet.” Critical attention to Dickey increased steadily following his receipt of the National Book Award for Buck-dancer’s Choice, in 1965, and peaked with the publication of Deliverance in 1970. His later works received less critical attention.

Deliverance: A Monument to Tall Tales

In Dickey’s internationally bestselling novel Deliverance, critics generally saw a thematic continuity with his poetry. A novel about how decent men kill, it is also about the bringing forth, through confrontation, of those qualities in a man that usually lie buried. ”In writing Deliverance,” said the New York Times’s Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, ”Dickey obviously made up his mind to tell a story, and on the theory that a story is an entertaining lie, he has produced a double-clutching whopper . . . Best of all, he has made a monument to tall stories.” Though Christopher Ricks, critiquing the novel in the New York Review of Books, believed Deliverance was ”too patently the concoction of a situation in which it will be morally permissible—nay, essential—to kill men with a bow and arrow,” Charles Thomas Samuels pointed out in the New Republic that Dickey ”himself seems aware of the harshness of his substructure and the absurdity of some of his details and overcomes these deficiencies through his styistic maneuvers: ”Such is Dickey’s linguistic virtuosity that he totally realizes an improbable plot. How a man acts when shot by an arrow, what it feels like to scale a cliff or to capsize, the ironic psychology of fear: these things are conveyed with remarkable descriptive writing. His publishers are right to call Deliverance a tour de force.

References

Baughman, Ronald. Understanding James Dickey. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press,1985.
Baughman, Ronald, ed. The Voiced Connections of James Dickey: Interviews and Conversations. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.
Bloom, Harold, ed. James Dickey: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Calhoun, Richard J. James Dickey: The Expansive Imagination: A Collection of Critical Essays.DeLand, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1973.
Calhoun, Richard J. and Robert W. James Dickey. Boston: Twayne, 1983.
Kirschten, Robert. “Struggling for Wings”: The Art of James Dickey. Columbia, S.C.: University of SouthCarolina Press, 1997.
Kirschten, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on James Dickey. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994.
Van Ness, Arthur Gordan. Outbelieving Existence: The Measured Motion of James Dickey. Columbia, S.C.:Camden House, 1992.
Weigl, Bruce and T. R. Hummer, eds. The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey. Urbana, Ill.:University of Illinois Press, 1984.
Oates, Joyce Carol. ”Out of Stone, Into Flesh: The Imagination of James Dickey.” Modern Poetry Studies 5 (Autumn 1974): 97-144.
Smith, Dave. ”The Strength of James Dickey.” Poetry 137 (March 1981): 349-358.
The Texas Review, Special Issue: The Fiction of James Dickey 17 (Fall/Winter 1996/1997).
Weatherby, H. L. ”The Way of Exchange in James Dickey’s Poetry.” Sewanee Review 74 (July-September 1966): 669-680.