SOURCE: "Warrior, Visionary, Natural Philosopher: James Dickey's To the White Sea," in The Southern Review, Vol. 33, Winter, 1997, pp. 164-80.

[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 … embodies many of the wisdoms and lessons of Dickey's poetry."]

To the White Sea, James Dickey's third novel, achieves perhaps as much a summing-up of the milestones and peak moments in its author's best poems as did Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion," also written in late career. Within the work's horrific narrative labyrinth are numerous passages that offer a retrospective survey of Dickey's hard-earned poetic mythologies, his achieved personal mythos. The book links the poet's favorite creeds, lores, and mystiques for an advance into his autumnal grasp that both contains and soars beyond them. Further, in its grappling with the key...