SOURCE: Smith, Raymond. “The Poetic Faith of James Dickey.” Modern Poetry Studies 2, no. 1 (1972): 259-72.

In the following essay, Smith describes Dickey's “poetic faith” as a sense of belief in nature illustrated most clearly in his hunting poems and in the mystic visions of his 1970 volume Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy.

Dissociating himself from the contemporary mode of cultivated cynicism, James Dickey refers to himself in Self-Interviews (1970) as a “born believer.” It is this capacity for belief that is a dominant characteristic of his poetry. It is a poetry of acceptance and celebration in the manner of Whitman. Dickey's faith is rooted in nature: nature is teacher and life-giver, and his reverence for nature is manifest in a primitive, almost totemic treatment of animals. The poet finds a brother in the owl, the deer, the bull. Hunting, once necessary for human survival, has become for him a...