Biography EssayGlory came early in James Dickey's career: six years after his first collection appeared in Poets of Today VII (1960), he won the 1966 National Book Award for Buckdancer's Choice (1965...
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James Dickey (1923-1997), with his unique vision, often violent imagery, and eccentric style, created for himself a place as an important American poet in the last half of the twentieth century. Altho...
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Writer James Dickey led a remarkable life as poet, novelist, critic, and screenwriter. Winner of the National Book Award for his verse collection Buckdancer's Choice, Dickey attained national and inte...
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[This entry was updated from its original form in Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 52--67.]James Dickey was a visionary poet who sought transformation of the Self in ord...
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In what he calls a "snapshot" of James Dickey in The Writer's Voice (1973), George Garrett has written, "Legends, myths, fables and fabliaux, anecdotes, quotations from, hard and funny sayings, tru...
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James Dickey was a visionary poet who sought transformation of the Self in order to live as fully as possible. Immersed in death encounters, he formulated a poetic vision dramatizing his heightened se...
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Critical Essay by Robert Penn Warren
["The Zodiac"] is consistently demanding, characteristically eloquent and often in an original way, and sometimes magnificent. I can think of no poe...
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Critical Essay by Harold Bloom
Dickey, after the lapse of his later poems,… ventures everything in The Zodiac, a longish poem of some 30 pages loosely based upon a modern Dutch original. Dicke...
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Critical Essay by Stanley Burnshaw
"[The Zodiac] is based on another of the same title by Hendrik Marsman", Dickey explains, and "with the exception of a few lines, is completely...
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Critical Essay by Raymond J. Smith
[The] protagonist of Dickey's [The Zodiac], a Dutch poet who uses the expression "Old Buddy," is a drunk. One would have hoped that the romanti...
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Critical Essay by Diane A. Parente
As a reviewer, I find myself somewhat intimidated, even awed by this beautiful, ambitious concert of effort. Artist (Marvin Hayes) and Poet (James Dickey) have comb...
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Critical Essay by Richard Finholt
Leonard Lutwack, in Heroic Fiction, has stated that Melville's Moby-Dick introduced "unequivocally the spirit of the epic to American fiction by daring...
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Critical Essay by Joan Bobbitt
Throughout his poetry, Dickey employs shockingly bizarre or ludicrous images to communicate the alien position of nature in the "civilized" world. Indeed,...
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Critical Essay by Linda Mizejewski
[James Dickey is a] poet whose best work has always been charged with the presence of the master performer. The best of his Poems 1957–1967 work like an idea...
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Critical Essay by Edw Ard Doughtie
When Ed Gentry, the narrator of James Dickey's Deliverance, stands over the corpse of the man he has killed with a bow and arrow, he waits for an impulse. &#...
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Critical Essay by Michael Dirda
Unfortunately, none of the poems (or translations "from the UnEnglish") in The Strength of Fields measures up to "The Performance," "...
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Critical Essay by Jane Flanders
[None of the poems in Dickey's The Strength of Fields] compares with his best, yet readers who know and like his work will feel at home. World War II still echo...
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Critical Essay by Paul Zweig
[The poems in The Strength of Fields] float down overwide pages, contract to a single word or expand across the page, lapse into italics, skip over blank intervals. They ...
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In the following review, Berry describes some of the poems in Helmets as clumsy and mechanical.
Going into this book [Helmets] is like going into an experience in your own life that you know will c...
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In the following essay, Strange identifies dream and memory as the main thematic concerns of the poems comprising Buckdancer's Choice.
Dream, memory, and poem are an ancient knot in a web of...
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In the following favorable review of Babel to Byzantium, Carroll examines the critical backlash against Dickey's work.
After I talk about this collection of book reviews and essays on modern...
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In the following excerpt, Morris provides a negative assessment of Poems, 1957-1967, calling the poems in the volume dull, awkward, and stylistically inferior.
James Dickey, Jean Garrigue, and Loui...
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In the following essay, Lensing offers a negative review of The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead, and Mercy.
When James Dickey's Poems 1957-1967 appeared three years ago, the p...
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In the following essay, Calhoun surveys the weakness in Dickey's Self-Interviews and The Eye-Beaters.
James Dickey's first novel, Deliverance, was such a phenomenal success that anyth...
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In the following unfavorable review, Plumly asserts that The Zodiac is “overwhelmed by its own ambition.”
James Dickey ends his twelve-part, twelve-tiered poem of The Zodiac with a ki...
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In the following review, French provides a negative assessment of The Zodiac.
James Dickey's reputation as a writer has grown in the past ten years. In fact, Dickey has lately become a highl...
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In the following essay, Mizejewski explores the confessional poetry of The Zodiac, focusing on Dickey's poetic persona.
Since the mid-sixties or so, one or two people at almost any English D...
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In the following mixed review of The Strength of Fields and The Zodiac, Cassity questions stylistic elements of Dickey's poetry.
If you write in lines so long that your book has to be printe...
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In the following essay, Calhoun and Hill discuss Dickey's reputation and work as a literary critic.
The “suspect” in Poetry
James Dickey's career as a literary critic be...
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In the following essay, Baughman explores the theme of renewal in Deliverance.
How Dickey changes and forms again is dramatically demonstrated in his only novel to date, Deliverance. In this work h...
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In the following essay, Christensen contends that the problem with The Central Motion: Poems, 1968-1979 is that Dickey “has tried to deal with middle age, his own, and fails to perceive in it v...
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In the following essay, Spears places Dickey and his work within the context of the Southern literary tradition.
Some years ago James Dickey, who will be 64 next month, responded to an interviewer&...
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In the following essay, which was initially published in 1987, Starr considers the major thematic concerns of Dickey's Alnilam.
James Dickey's second novel, Alnilam, is definitely not...
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In the following essay, Brewer perceives the storylines of Dickey's two novels as interpretations of the passage of the mythical hero as detailed in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Tho...
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In the following essay, Schmitt maintains that Dickey provides an ironic treatment of the mythical hero in his novel Deliverance.
According to James Dickey himself, the source of the novel Delivera...
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In the following essay, Van Ness surveys the central thematic concerns of and the critical reaction to Dickey's nonfiction.
In a 1974 article discussing his efforts and those of painter Hube...
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In the following essay, Smith views Dickey in the context of a Southern writer.
With the death of Robert Penn Warren, the mantle of preeminent Southern poet seems destined to fall to James Dickey. ...
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In the following essay, Baughman examines the symbolic meaning of the settings in Alnilam.
James Dickey's second novel, Alnilam, concentrates on three major settings that serve as symbolic c...
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In the following essay, Suarez juxtaposes Dickey's novel with the film version of Deliverance.
James Dickey and director John Boorman battled over the making of Deliverance to the point that...
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In the following essay, Bidney underscores the relationship between Dickey's Deliverance and the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
I'd like to be some sort of bird, a migratory seabird...
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In the following excerpt, Hassan contrasts the two main characters—Ed and Lewis—in Dickey's novel Deliverance.
In contrast to Bellow's and Mailer's fictions, Jame...
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In the following essay, Butterworth provides an interpretation of the psychological aspects of Deliverance.
On the dust jacket of the first edition of James Dickey's Deliverance an eye peers...
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In the following essay, Thompson considers the “heraldic symbolism” found in Dickey's Deliverance.
Originally published in 1970, Deliverance, James Dickey's first and mo...
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In the following excerpt, Gwynn compares Dickey's work and declining critical reputation to that of the Georgian poets, especially Rupert Brooke.
No group of poets has suffered worse at the ...
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In the following review, Donoghue discusses Dickey's public persona as well as poets that influenced his writing, particularly Theodore Roethke.
In November 1968 James Dickey told readers of...
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In the following essay, Hart addresses the problems in researching Dickey's life story, asserting that “nearly everything Dickey said about his life was an embroidery of fiction and fact...
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In the following unfavorable assessment, Meyers derides the errors in and superficial treatment of Dickey's collected letters.
Virgil's Aeneas, weeping over the frescoes that depict t...
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In the following essay, Hart investigates the ways in which Dickey's wartime experiences affected his poetic sensibility.
During the spring of 1945, Radar Officer James Dickey was hard at wo...
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In the following review of Drowning With Others, Nemerov offers an impressionistic, then critical, assessment of Dickey's second volume of poetry.
Coming to know an unfamiliar poetry is an o...
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In the following essay, Oates studies Dickey's collections from Into the Stone, to Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy, addressing his development and principal poetic them...
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In the following essay, Bloom assesses Dickey's pre-1965 poetry, commenting on such pieces as “The Other,” “Drowning With Others,” “In the Mountain Tent, ...
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In the following review of Puella, Applewhite admires the diversity and taut clarity of this poetic collection.
In considering the relation between these poems from the point of view of a girl grow...
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In the following essay, Baughman examines the principal poems of Buckdancer's Choice, illuminating significant themes and mentioning Dickey's sustained evocation of human ambivalence and...
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In the following review of The Central Motion: Poems, 1968-1979, Christensen considers Dickey's Southerness and evaluates his poetry of middle age from the collections Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victo...
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In the following essay, Van Ness traces Dickey's use of the mythic archetype of the “Queen Goddess” and idealization of women in such works as “Adultery,” “Th...
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In the following review, Tillinghast provides a laudatory overview of Dickey's poetic career.
The publication this summer of James Dickey's The Whole Motion finally makes available un...
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In the following essay, Van Ness summarizes the critical reception of Dickey's two volumes of children's poetry.
Dickey's two children's books, Tucky the Hunter (1978) a...
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In the following essay, Laurence analyzes the volume Puella, emphasizing a movement toward the aesthetic “possession” of its female subject and a balancing stylistic quality of “l...
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In the following essay, Kirschten expresses the magical, mythopoeic mode of Dickey's verse.
In the late sixties, when he collected his first five books of poetry into one volume, James Dicke...
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In the following review of Dickey's Poems: 1957-1967, originally published in 1967, Lieberman remarks on Dickey's poetic vision and its mixture of the comic and the serious.
The perso...
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In the following essay, Rich construes Dickey's poem “The Firebombing” as implicating the reader in its speaker's guilt.
Jacques-Louis David originally displayed his pai...
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In the following essay, Fraser records his impressions of Dickey's poetic voice and style.
Dickey invokes this “Dear God of the wildness of poetry” in a poem of the '60s...
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In the following excerpted review of Dickey's The Selected Poems, Gwynn acknowledges the energy of the poet's early verse, unfortunately underrepresented in this collection.
If James ...
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In the following essay, Donoghue chronicles Dickey's life and career, his poetic development and influences, and his popular success combined with literary decline.
In November 1968 James Di...
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In the following review, Mills explores Dickey's almost mystical poetic process and his characteristic themes—including the spiritual interpenetration of the living and the dead—b...
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In the following essay, originally published in 1968, Lieberman presents commentary on Dickey's innovative and varied use of poetic symbolism and form.
In The Suspect in Poetry, a first coll...
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In the following essay, Smith describes Dickey's “poetic faith” as a sense of belief in nature illustrated most clearly in his hunting poems and in the mystic visions of his 1970 ...
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In the following essay, Hill highlights Dickey's comic poetic vision, even as it frequently manifests amidst tragic circumstances.
Sometimes James Dickey talks too much, as in “May Da...
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In the following essay, Bobbitt focuses on Dickey's often grotesque poetic juxtaposition of the world of nature and the world of man.
Neither James Dickey's reverence for nature nor h...
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In the following review of The Zodiac, French notes that Dickey's ambitious poem is deeply flawed and improperly realized.
James Dickey's reputation as a writer has grown in the past ...
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In the following essay, Calhoun and Hill undertake a thematic and stylistic survey of the poetry in Dickey's second collection, Drowning With Others, occasionally comparing the volume with his ...
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In the following review, Berry describes some of the poems in Helmets as clumsy and mechanical.
Going into this book [Helmets] is like going into an experience in your own life that you know will c...
Read more
In the following essay, Mizejewski explores the confessional poetry of The Zodiac, focusing on Dickey's poetic persona.
Since the mid-sixties or so, one or two people at almost any English D...
Read more
In the following mixed review of The Strength of Fields and The Zodiac, Cassity questions stylistic elements of Dickey's poetry.
If you write in lines so long that your book has to be printe...
Read more
In the following essay, Calhoun and Hill discuss Dickey's reputation and work as a literary critic.
The “suspect” in Poetry
James Dickey's career as a literary critic be...
Read more
In the following essay, Baughman explores the theme of renewal in Deliverance.
How Dickey changes and forms again is dramatically demonstrated in his only novel to date, Deliverance. In this work h...
Read more
In the following essay, Christensen contends that the problem with The Central Motion: Poems, 1968-1979 is that Dickey “has tried to deal with middle age, his own, and fails to perceive in it v...
Read more
In the following essay, Spears places Dickey and his work within the context of the Southern literary tradition.
Some years ago James Dickey, who will be 64 next month, responded to an interviewer&...
Read more
In the following essay, which was initially published in 1987, Starr considers the major thematic concerns of Dickey's Alnilam.
James Dickey's second novel, Alnilam, is definitely not...
Read more
In the following essay, Brewer perceives the storylines of Dickey's two novels as interpretations of the passage of the mythical hero as detailed in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Tho...
Read more
In the following essay, Schmitt maintains that Dickey provides an ironic treatment of the mythical hero in his novel Deliverance.
According to James Dickey himself, the source of the novel Delivera...
Read more
In the following essay, Van Ness surveys the central thematic concerns of and the critical reaction to Dickey's nonfiction.
In a 1974 article discussing his efforts and those of painter Hube...
Read more
In the following essay, Strange identifies dream and memory as the main thematic concerns of the poems comprising Buckdancer's Choice.
Dream, memory, and poem are an ancient knot in a web of...
Read more
In the following essay, Smith views Dickey in the context of a Southern writer.
With the death of Robert Penn Warren, the mantle of preeminent Southern poet seems destined to fall to James Dickey. ...
Read more
In the following essay, Baughman examines the symbolic meaning of the settings in Alnilam.
James Dickey's second novel, Alnilam, concentrates on three major settings that serve as symbolic c...
Read more
In the following essay, Bidney underscores the relationship between Dickey's Deliverance and the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
I'd like to be some sort of bird, a migratory seabird...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Hassan contrasts the two main characters—Ed and Lewis—in Dickey's novel Deliverance.
In contrast to Bellow's and Mailer's fictions, Jame...
Read more
In the following essay, Butterworth provides an interpretation of the psychological aspects of Deliverance.
On the dust jacket of the first edition of James Dickey's Deliverance an eye peers...
Read more
In the following essay, Thompson considers the “heraldic symbolism” found in Dickey's Deliverance.
Originally published in 1970, Deliverance, James Dickey's first and mo...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Gwynn compares Dickey's work and declining critical reputation to that of the Georgian poets, especially Rupert Brooke.
No group of poets has suffered worse at the ...
Read more
In the following review, Donoghue discusses Dickey's public persona as well as poets that influenced his writing, particularly Theodore Roethke.
In November 1968 James Dickey told readers of...
Read more
In the following essay, Hart addresses the problems in researching Dickey's life story, asserting that “nearly everything Dickey said about his life was an embroidery of fiction and fact...
Read more
In the following favorable review of Babel to Byzantium, Carroll examines the critical backlash against Dickey's work.
After I talk about this collection of book reviews and essays on modern...
Read more
In the following unfavorable assessment, Meyers derides the errors in and superficial treatment of Dickey's collected letters.
Virgil's Aeneas, weeping over the frescoes that depict t...
Read more
In the following essay, Hart investigates the ways in which Dickey's wartime experiences affected his poetic sensibility.
During the spring of 1945, Radar Officer James Dickey was hard at wo...
Read more
In the following excerpt, Morris provides a negative assessment of Poems, 1957-1967, calling the poems in the volume dull, awkward, and stylistically inferior.
James Dickey, Jean Garrigue, and Loui...
Read more
In the following essay, Lensing offers a negative review of The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead, and Mercy.
When James Dickey's Poems 1957-1967 appeared three years ago, the p...
Read more
In the following essay, Calhoun surveys the weakness in Dickey's Self-Interviews and The Eye-Beaters.
James Dickey's first novel, Deliverance, was such a phenomenal success that anyth...
Read more
In the following unfavorable review, Plumly asserts that The Zodiac is “overwhelmed by its own ambition.”
James Dickey ends his twelve-part, twelve-tiered poem of The Zodiac with a ki...
Read more
In the following review, French provides a negative assessment of The Zodiac.
James Dickey's reputation as a writer has grown in the past ten years. In fact, Dickey has lately become a highl...
Read more
[In the following interview, conducted in August, 1989, Dickey discusses his work, his life, and his political and literary ideas.]
At the age of thirty-five, James Dickey, in the poem "The ...
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[In the following obituary, Krebs presents a detailed review of Dickey's life and career.]
James Dickey, one of the nation's most distinguished modern poets and a critic, lecturer and...
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[In the following excerpt, Mackinnon condemns Dickey's The Eagle's Mile as "a clanging, overweening collection."]
[I]n the title poem, "The Eagle's Mile&#x...
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[In the following review, Pratt discusses the language in The Eagle's Mile.]
Having long ago charted his place as a leading American poet of flight, James Dickey makes flight the central the...
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[In the following essay, Kirschten analyzes the significance of the stewardess in Dickey's "Falling."]
A quarter of a century ago, well before many current intellectual trends ...
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[In the following review, Johnson asserts that Dickey's To the White Sea "is less ambitious and in some ways less accomplished than his previous novels."]
Only a handful of wri...
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[In the following review, Wiley discusses the main theme of Dickey's To the White Sea.]
James Dickey makes novels out of ideas. In Deliverance, 23 years ago, the idea was to take four men, e...
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[In the following review, Melmoth calls Dickey's To the White Sea "a bitterly cold novel" that "is not for those of a nervous disposition."]
To the White Sea is a...
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[In the following essay, Tapply argues that Dickey's Deliverance is among the great novels of American culture.]
When my friend Mike McGill gave me a book for my thirtieth birthday in 1970, ...
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[In the following review, Curran states that Dickey's To the White Sea "becomes a quest for the pure ecstasy that identification with nature will grant Muldrow."]
In the early ...
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[In the following essay, Kirschten asserts that Dickey's The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy "constitutes one of the central transitional texts in Dickey'...
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[In the following essay, Bidney traces the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writing in Dickey's Deliverance.]
"I like to work my mind, such as it is," said James D...
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[In the following review, Rich asserts that Dickey's poem "The Firebombing" "can be shown to implicate the reader in the blame for the firebombing of Japan during World War...
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[In the following essay, Butterworth discusses the savage side of man portrayed in Dickey's Deliverance and analyzes how characterization structures the novel.]
On the dust jacket of the fir...
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[In the following essay, Lieberman asserts that Muldrow, the main character in Dickey's To the White Sea, "serves as a kind of contemplative mouthpiece for the author and … embodi...
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Selected home-video releases:"Death Proof"Quentin Tarantino's part of "Grindhouse," the double-feature he made with Robert Rodriguez, comes to DVD in a two-disc set, featuring an extended and unrat...
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James Dickey
James Dickey
James (Lafayette) Dickey
Critical Essay by Robert Penn Warren
New DVD releases: `Death Proof'
