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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 order to live as fully as possible. Immersed in death encounters, he formulated a poetic vision dramatizing his heightened sense of renewal to experience, to life. At the same time he recognized that death and the dead were his constant companions, and he consequently tried to maintain a balance between life and death by connecting with the Other. He attempted to transcend his station as a human being through an "exchange of identities," as H. L. Weatherby notes in his Sewanee Review essay "The Way of Exchange in James Dickey's Poetry." This exchange of identities--with other people, with animals, and with inanimate objects--became a means of acquiring their knowledge, of absorbing new and more expansive points of view. These concerns and this process were central to Dickey's poetry throughout his more than thirty-five years as a writer.
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