SOURCE: Bobbitt, Joan. “Unnatural Order in the Poetry of James Dickey.” Concerning Poetry 11, no. 1 (spring 1978): 39-44.

In the following essay, Bobbitt focuses on Dickey's often grotesque poetic juxtaposition of the world of nature and the world of man.

Neither James Dickey's reverence for nature nor his fear that “we have lost the cosmos” while constructing our technological society marks him as unique. Yet, by his own admission, Dickey is no ordinary “stick and stone” pantheist. His avowed interest in the relationship between the “man-made world” and the “universe-made world” may bear some resemblance to Wordsworth, Emerson, or even Lawrence, but his expression of it is hardly typical.¹ Throughout his poetry, Dickey employs shockingly bizarre or ludicrous images to communicate the alien position of nature in the “civilized” world. Indeed, the juxtaposition of the world of nature and the world of man often leads to grotesque incongruities. Things seem...