James Dickey
James Dickey was an influential American poet, novelist, and educator, known for his unique voice in contemporary literature. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, he served in World War II before pursuing higher education at Vanderbilt University, where he earned degrees in English and graduated with honors. His teaching career began at Rice University, and he later held positions at various institutions, including Reed College and the University of South Carolina. Dickey received numerous accolades for his poetry, including the National Book Award for his collection "Buckdancer's Choice."
He is perhaps best known for his novel "Deliverance," which was adapted into a successful film in which he made a cameo appearance. His poetry is characterized by its accessibility and emotional resonance, reflecting a desire to connect with readers. In addition to his literary achievements, Dickey had a passion for field archery, hunting, and guitar playing. He passed away at the age of seventy-three due to complications from lung disease. His posthumous collection, "Death, and the Day's Light," featured previously unpublished work, showcasing his enduring legacy in American literature.
James Dickey
American poet and writer of fiction, nonfiction, and screen adaptations, best known for the novel and film, Deliverance.
- Born: February 2, 1923
- Birthplace: Atlanta, Georgia
- Died: January 19, 1997
- Place of death: Columbia, South Carolina
Biography
James Lafayette Dickey spent his childhood in Atlanta, where his father was a suburban attorney. He attended Clemson College before entering military service for World War II during his freshman year. After the war, he attended Vanderbilt University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and from which he graduated with honors. From Vanderbilt, Dickey received both an A.B. and an M.A. in English. He began a teaching career at Rice University in 1949. His teaching was interrupted, however, when he was recalled to serve with the U.S. Air Force in the Korean War. He resumed teaching and civilian life in 1952 at the University of Florida, Gainesville.
From 1963 through 1964, Dickey was poet-in-residence at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. He then taught at colleges in California, at the University of Wisconsin, and at the University of South Carolina. He became consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress in 1966. As a poet, he received many awards: the Union League Prize in 1958, the Vachel Lindsay Award in 1959, the Longview Award in 1959, the Melville Cane Award in 1965-1966, and the National Book Award in 1966 for the volume Buckdancer’s Choice. Dickey was a Sewanee Review Fellow from 1954 through 1955 and a Guggenheim Fellow from 1962 through 1963. His novel Deliverance was made into a critically and popularly successful film in which Dickey played the part of Sheriff Bullard.
As a poet, James Dickey avoided classification with a movement, even though for a time he and his guitar made the rounds of the poetry-reading circuit of U.S. campuses. Of his own poetry, Dickey said that he wanted what he wrote to mean something to people in the situations in which they find themselves, rather than to be a display of his own abilities as a poet. As a result, his poetry has a simplicity and a directness, as exemplified in “The Firebombing,” one of his best-known poems. Not surprisingly, one of James Dickey’s favorite poets was Richard Wilbur.
Dickey was married twice and was the father of a daughter and two sons. He was enthusiastic about field archery, hunting, and guitar playing as personal hobbies. Dickey died of complications from lung disease at the age of seventy-three.
In 2015 Dickey’s Death, and the Day’s Light, was published posthumously. The collection included two previously unpublished poems on bodybuilding that Dickey had been working on at the time of his death. These two poems were finalized by Dickey scholar Gordon Van Ness, who collated Dickey’s drafts and chose the most repeated wording for each poem.
Author Works
Poetry:
Into the Stone, and Other Poems, 1960
Drowning with Others, 1962
Helmets, 1964
Two Poems of the Air, 1964
Buckdancer’s Choice, 1965
Poems, 1957–1967, 1967
The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead, and Mercy, 1970
The Zodiac, 1976
God’s Images, 1977
The Strength of Fields, 1977
The Owl King, 1977
The Enemy from Eden, 1978
Veteran Birth: The Gadfly Poems, 1947–1949, 1978
Head-Deep in Strange Sounds: Free-Flight Improvisations from the UnEnglish, 1979
Scion, 1980
The Early Motion, 1981
Falling, May Day Sermon, and Other Poems, 1981
Puella, 1982
The Central Motion: Poems, 1968–1979, 1983
Intervisions: Poems and Photographs, 1983 (with Sharon Anglin Kuhne)
From the Green Horseshoe, 1987
Wayfarer: A Voice from the Southern Mountains, 1988 (William Bake, photographer)
The Eagle’s Mile, 1990
The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945–1992, 1992
Death, and the Day’s Light, 2015 (Gordon Van Ness, editor)
Long Fiction:
Deliverance, 1970
Alnilam, 1987
To the White Sea, 1993
Screenplay:
Deliverance, 1972 (adaptation of his novel)
Teleplay:
The Call of the Wild, 1976 (adaptation of Jack London’s novel)
Nonfiction:
The Suspect in Poetry, 1964
Spinning the Crystal Ball, 1967
From Babel to Byzantium, 1968
Metaphor as Pure Adventure, 1968
Self-Interviews, 1970
Sorties, 1971
Exchanges, 1971 (with Joseph Trumbull Stickney)
Jericho: The South Beheld, 1974 (Hubert Shuptrine, photographer)
The Enemy from Eden, 1978
In Pursuit of the Grey Soul, 1978
The Water-Bug’s Mittens: Ezra Pound—What We Can Use, 1980
The Starry Place Between the Antlers: Why I Live in South Carolina, 1981
The Poet Turns on Himself, 1982
False Youth—Four Seasons, 1983
The Voiced Connections of James Dickey, 1989
Striking In: the Early Notebooks of James Dickey, 1996 (Gordon Van Ness, editor)
Crux: The Letters of James Dickey, 1999
The One Voice of James Dickey: His Letters and Life, 1942–1969, 2003 (Gordon Van Ness, editor)
Classes on Modern Poets and the Art of Poetry, 2004 (Donald J. Greiner, editor)
Children's/Young Adult Literature
Tucky the Hunter, 1979 (Marie Angel, illustrator)
Bronwen, the Traw, and the Shape-Shifter: A Poem in Four Parts, 1986
Miscellaneous:
Night Hurdling:Poems, Essays, Conversations, Commencements, and Afterwords, 1983
The James Dickey Reader, 1999
Bibliography
Baughman, Ronald. The Voiced Connections of James Dickey. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. This collection of interviews by Dickey’s colleague at the University of South Carolina covers Dickey’s career from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. A chronology and index are included.
Bowers, Neal. James Dickey: The Poet as Pitchman. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. Focuses on Dickey as a public figure who was not only a successful poet but also a successful promoter of his work and of poetry in general. Includes Bowers’s analysis of individual poems and his assessment of Dickey as “pitchman” for poetry. Study serves as an introductory overview of Dickey as a media phenomenon.
Calhoun, Richard J., and Robert W. Hill. James Dickey. Boston: Twayne, 1983. The first book-length study of Dickey’s work, this study covers his writing from Into the Stone, and Other Poems to Puella. The authors attempt to analyze virtually everything Dickey wrote during a twenty-two-year period. Provides an introduction to Dickey.
Dickey, Christopher. Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. A biography of Dickey written by his son. Includes bibliographical references and an index.
Havird, David. “A Death Yard of Junk.” Review of Death, and the Day’s Light, by James Dickey, edited by Gordon Van Ness. Sewanee Review, vol. 124, no. 1, pp. 174–79. EBSCO Discovery Service Academic, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=113459123&site=eds-live. Accessed 20 Apr. 2017. A review of Dickey’s posthumously published poetry collection. Includes a description of how the collection was compiled and finalized.
Hart, Henry. James Dickey: The World as a Lie. New York: Picador USA, 2000. A narrative biography detailing the rise and self-destruction of a literary reputation. Little of Dickey’s prose or verse is quoted for analysis, and the book relies on Dickey’s interviews and those held by the power of his personality.
Kirschten, Robert. James Dickey and the Gentle Ecstasy of Earth: A Reading of the Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Provides readings of Dickey’s poems. Employs four hypotheses—mysticism, neoplatonism, romanticism, and primitivism—to identify Dickey’s characteristic techniques and thematic concerns. When a poem is analyzed extensively, long sections of it are reprinted so readers can follow the critic’s insights.
Kirschten, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on James Dickey. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994. Provides early reviews and a selection of more modern scholarship. Authors include Robert Bly, Paul Carroll, James Wright, and Wendell Berry. Bibliography and index.
Suarez, Ernest. “Emerson in Vietnam: Dickey, Bly, and the New Left.” Southern Literary Journal, Spring, 1991, 100–112. Examines controversial elements in Dickey’s poems and the adverse critical reaction to Dickey’s work. His complex metaphysics collided with the politics of a historic particular, the Vietnam War, generating a New Left critical agenda that could not accommodate the philosophical underpinnings of his poetry. The result was widespread misinterpretations of Dickey’s work.
Suarez, Ernest. “The Uncollected Dickey: Pound, New Criticism, and the Narrative Image.” American Poetry 7 (Fall, 1990): 127–45. By examining Dickey’s early uncollected poems and his correspondence with Ezra Pound, Suarez documents Dickey’s struggle to move out from under modernism’s domination and arrive at his mature poetic aesthetic.
Weigl, Bruce, and T. R. Hummer, eds. The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Presents articles on Dickey up to 1984. Includes Joyce Carol Oates’s “Out of the Stone and into the Flesh,” which argues that Dickey is a relentlessly honest writer who explores human condition in a world of violence and chaos.