SOURCE: Lieberman, Laurence. “James Dickey: The Worldly Mystic.” In Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary American Poets, pp. 73-82. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995.

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 persona in James Dickey's new poems, those that appear in the final section, “Falling,” of his book Poems: 1957-1967, is a unique human personality. He is a worldly mystic. On the one hand, a joyous, expansive personality—all candor, laughter, and charm—in love with his fully conscious gestures, the grace and surety of moves of his body. An outgoing man. An extrovert. On the other hand, a chosen man. A man who has been picked by some mysterious, intelligent agent in the universe to act out a secret destiny:

                              … something was given a life-...