[In the following excerpt, Gwynn compares Dickey's work and declining critical reputation to that of the Georgian poets, especially Rupert Brooke.]

No group of poets has suffered worse at the hands of posterity than the Georgians, whose poems were collected in five eponymous semiannual anthologies. The last of these had the misfortune to appear in the same year as The Waste Land, and after Eliot, Edith Sitwell, and Middleton Murry had finished mopping the floor with it, the Georgians were consigned to the back matter of the history of modernism. Of their number, none has been devalued more than Rupert Brooke, who is remembered chiefly as the poster boy for British army recruitment, the result of the great popularity of “1914,” the sonnet sequence he wrote in the last year of his life. Brooke, who by all accounts was intelligent, handsome, charming, a bit facetious, and a fearlessly outspoken Fabian in matters political, would doubtless have been appalled by the reasons for his posthumous fame. But, to readers familiar with Sassoon, Graves, and Owen, his lines comparing a foredoomed generation's call to the trenches to “swimmers into cleanness leaping” seem hopelessly, even criminally naive.

A shame in a way, for the poetry on which Brooke built a not inconsiderable reputation accurately captures that lulling decade before the Great War, an era which, if the huge success of Titanic is any measure, large numbers of us still privately embrace (Those tea dances! Those great hats!). It must have been an auspicious time for a rising young poet, especially if, like Brooke, one had the necessary prerequisites of social standing, the right school ties, a bit of money, and rather more of talent. The typical Brookean/Georgian poem celebrates the long mornings at the country house, mowed lawns and overgrown gardens, the declamation of one's latest strophes over crumpets and croquet balls with even the fish “fly-replete, in depth of June, / Dawdling away their wat'ry noon.” Even what Brooke later called “all the little emptiness of love” rarely breaks the calm; one's most fervent passions are reserved for “the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon / Smooth away trouble,” and no matter seems more pressing than that notorious closing question, “And is there honey still for tea?” Reading the Georgian anthologies provides quick transport into the servants-at-the-ready realm of Merchant-Ivory—sans conflict, bad weather, and the Great War lurking in the shadows.

I dredge up this ancient matter for a reason: if the work of many contemporary poets is any indication, we are in the midst of a Georgian revival. The weekend has become the setting in which our poets thrive. Who can blame them? They live in comfortable times; the issues that impelled them thirty years ago to take to the barricades lie far behind. They are loath to resurrect their checkered pasts or to jeopardize their futures by confessing present sins. They may have lived through the whirlwind but now seem content to cultivate their gardens—not imaginary ones with real toads in them but real ones flourishing with everything but imagination. They desperately need the challenge of urgent subjects but cannot urge themselves to look for them outside their own privacy fences. We have slipped from the Age of Causes to the Age of Cozy; if Thoreau were to survey the current scene, he might be forced to conclude that the mass of men lead lives of quiet.

If James Dickey, whose selected poems [The Selected Poems] have recently appeared, is to have any lasting legacy, it strikes me that it will lie in the way he was able to infuse our suburban humdrum with an energy that is well nigh sacramental. Rereading early poems like “Sleeping Out on Easter,” “The Vegetable King” or “The Mountain Tent,” I know that this is just Everyguy camping out in a state park on the fringes of urban Atlanta, but a palpable shiver still comes with lines like

I am hearing the shape of the rain
Take the shape of the tent and believe it,
Laying down all around where I lie
A profound, unspeakable law.

Those incantatory trimeters contribute to the effect, true, but I can never hear them without feeling a little smaller and weaker, without wishing my inadequate sleeping bag could hide me completely. As stagey and predictable as many of Dickey's performances seem when we revisit them, they were, and are, capable of generating an awe that none of his contemporaries ever quite managed. If I am not quite struck with it on reading “Falling” for the umpteenth time, I can at least honestly recall that I was the first five or six.

Rupert Brooke's reputation has declined mightily, but that falling off seems less precipitous than the collapse of Dickey's, the fault less of the poems that made his name than of the noisy celebrity and weak books of his last two decades. His work has all but disappeared from the anthologies of American literature, and even in Norton's recent The Literature of the American South he is allotted only the same number of pages as nikki giovanni! His son's widely read memoir and the inevitable biographies will doubtless spur reassessments; thus, it is good to have Robert Kirschten's portable volume at hand. That said, I can't help but have several regrets about the editor's initial assumptions and the choices that result. In an attempt to define Dickey's best qualities, Kirschten outlines Dickey's “four major poetic modes”: his natural mysticism, his Pythagorean reverence for music, his romanticism, and his primitivism. These are valid enough, perhaps, but they ignore the solid grounding in his generation's realities that gave Dickey's early work such resonance. First, there are the war poems. Kirschten includes “The Performance,” with its curious syntax brilliantly mimicking the unsteady acrobatics of its doomed protagonist, but he excludes “Between Two Prisoners,” in which two captured Americans await execution in an island schoolroom, and the spooky “The Driver,” where Dickey (as always, a problematical assumption) dives into a Pacific lagoon and sits in the driver's seat of a sunken half-track.

Further, I miss many of Dickey's best poems of postwar civilized discontent: “The Leap,” a narrative about the suicide of a woman remembered from childhood; “On the Coosawattee,” which contains the probable (and certainly less melodramatic) genesis of Deliverance; “Power and Light,” a brutal blue-collar dramatic monologue; and “Adultery,” which is bracketed by the best opening and closing lines of any Dickey poem: “We have all been in rooms / We cannot die in, and they are odd places, and sad” and

We have done it again                    we are
Still living. Sit up and smile,
God bless you. Guilt is magical.

I would have preferred more guilty magic like this (and where is the marvelous “Kudzu”?) to reprinting the ten-page “Reincarnation (II)” or more than the briefest sample from Dickey's last book, the inscrutable The Eagle's Mile.

Kirschten states that his aim is “to gather and showcase [Dickey's] very best material” and in doing so has to admit that Dickey's collected poems, The Whole Motion, is a bit too whole for most tastes (even Dickey excluded portions of the slack Puella). Kirschten does get a fair portion of the best ones in his limited space (the book is over a hundred pages shorter than Poems 1957-1967), but it is probably a sign of the times that in introducing Dickey's four “politically controversial” poems—“Slave Quarters,” “The Fiend,” “The Sheep Child,” and “The Firebombing”—he feels it necessary to attach a disclaimer (his italics): “Further, representation is not recommendation.” Now we can all sleep better. One wonders how this editor would preface a selection from the works of Robert Browning.

Dickey once said, “The whole tragedy of the American poets of my generation is that they were afraid to change. …” Dickey's own example provides one effective counterargument to that, for his changes in retrospect seem invariably for the worst.