Dickey, James (Vol. 4) - Dickey, James 1923–

Dickey, James 1923–

Dickey is an American poet, critic, and novelist. Although his novel Deliverance was enormously successful, he considers himself primarily a poet. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12, rev. ed.)

Mr. Dickey's materials have a noble simplicity, a constancy extending through many poems. Merely to catalogue them is no use; to project in a single relation their somewhat delicate developments is perhaps impossible, but I shall have to make some more or less compromised try at it.

My impression of the process of his poetry is that it runs something like this: water—stone—the life of animals—of children—of the hunter, who is also the poet. It is rarely or never so simple as this, yet the intention seems often enough this, a feeling one's way down the chain of being, a becoming the voice which shall make dumb things respond, sometimes to their hurt or deaths, a sensing of alien modes of experience,...

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