Dickey, James - Joyce Carol Oates (essay date 1984)

Joyce Carol Oates (essay date 1984)

SOURCE: Oates, Joyce Carol. “Out of Stone, into Flesh: The Imagination of James Dickey, 1960-1970.” In The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, edited by Bruce Weigl and T. R. Hummer, pp. 64-107. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

[In the following essay, Oates studies Dickey's collections from Into the Stone, to Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy, addressing his development and principal poetic themes, and highlighting Dickey's unique expression of man's instinctual savagery.]

Despair and exultation
Lie down together and thrash
In the hot grass, no blade moving. …

Dickey, “Turning Away”

A man cannot pay as much attention to
himself as I do without living in Hell
all the time.

Dickey, Sorties

The remarkable poetic achievement of James Dickey is characterized by a restless concern with the...

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