SOURCE: Hart, Henry. “James Dickey: Journey to War.” Southern Review 36, no. 2 (spring 2000): 348-77.

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 work composing poems and reading Louis Untermeyer's poetry anthology and Shakespeare's sonnets. He paid particular attention to Untermeyer's selection of Ernest Dowson's delicate, antiquated lyrics, and tried to imitate them in his own poems. He liked Dowson so much that he asked his mother on May 29 to find his Dowson collection, copy out several poems, and send them to him. He also asked her to send a biography of Dowson by Mark Longaker, and grew furious when she suggested, after having bought the book, that she might return it to the store. To show Dowson's beneficial effects on his style, he mailed her one of his imitations...