Biography Essay

Glory 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); five years after that, his novel Deliverance (1970) and its movie version in 1972 made him famous almost beyond the hopes of any American poet. Despite the glory and fortune proceeding from bestselling novels and movies, Dickey has persisted in his claims that "Poetry is ... the center of the creative wheel: everything else is actually just a spinoff from that: literary criticism, screenplays, novels, even advertising copy." But Dickey objects to the idea of poetry as only a linguistic exercise: "I dislike the hell out of the notion of poetry or the poem as a kind of a lab subject laid up on the seminar table like a dead cat in a biology lab to be dissected all with a...