SOURCE: Fraser, Russell. “James Dickey's Dear God of the Wildness of Poetry.” Southern Review 34, no. 1 (winter 1998): 112-24.

In the following essay, Fraser records his impressions of Dickey's poetic voice and style.

Dickey invokes this “Dear God of the wildness of poetry” in a poem of the '60s, “For the Last Wolverine.” He liked poems about animals, the wilder the better. Doomed to extinction, the wolverine gnaws its prey and looks straight at eternity, dimly aware of being the last of its kind. The poet doesn't mind if the reader thinks of him. Omnivorous and insatiable, he is like Thoreau devouring the woodchuck, all of it, hooves, hair, and hide.

When Dickey died at the beginning of 1997, he had dwindled, said his friend Lance Morrow, to a seventy-three-year-old ruin, “his flesh slack over the armature of bone, the lungs and liver a disaster.” Life magazine, introducing the pop...