Dickey, James (Vol. 7) - Dickey, James 1923–

Dickey, James 1923–

Dickey, an American poet, novelist, and critic, has been compared with Hart Crane for his emphasis on the interrelationship between the natural and the mechanical. His work is often set in the South and, while intensely autobiographical, it celebrates the uniqueness and richness of each individual's experiences. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12, rev. ed.)

Taken as a whole, Dickey's poetry is a phantasmagoria, a life of remembered moments, a vision with few plain human actions: all is flying, diving, soaring, drifting, creeping, sliding, falling—through the skies, along field, forest, stream, beneath the waters of the world—in animal guises, scales, wings, fins, furred and thrusting haunches, naked and inhuman limbs. He moves in nature, of it, not through cities; in wildness aboriginal or feral, never suburban or tame.

And his voice is seldom in the midranges we use conversing, meditating, arguing;...

[The entire page is 8573 words long]

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