SOURCE: Calhoun, Richard J., and Robert W. Hill. “The Literary Criticism, Lately Neglected.” In James Dickey, pp. 124-35. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1983.

[In the following essay, Calhoun and Hill discuss Dickey's reputation and work as a literary critic.]

THE “SUSPECT” IN POETRY

James Dickey's career as a literary critic began when he was poetry editor and reviewer for the Sewanee Review. There he developed something of a reputation as a “hatchet man” who deftly chopped down the reputations of poets he did not respect. Robert Penn Warren, later a friend and admirer, recalls: “When James Dickey came to my attention as a reviewer, I thought he was one of the roughest around.”¹ This reputation was not quite deserved since Dickey's critical hatchet was reserved only for what he called in the first collection of his reviews the “suspect” in poetry. Dickey's reviews were perceived variously as entertaining, opinionated, sometimes harsh, displaying an excess of ego; but not, as they might well be regarded in retrospect, as important contributions to Dickey's own vision of a freer, personal, but still carefully crafted postmodernist poetry. Style and tone were admired more than substance.

There are other reasons for James Dickey's meager reputation as a literary critic. First of all, he began as a poetry reviewer, and he has continued to express his critical ideas outside formal critical performances—writing not essays but additional reviews, giving numerous interviews, and tape recording for publication one uniquely egocentric volume—Self-Interviews. Second, the personality of Dickey, his “unrepressed ego,” was always much in evidence in what he wrote, to the annoyance of some of his reviewers; the consequence of Dickey's intense subjectivity has been to obscure the importance of his contributions as poet-critic as well as the relationship of intensely held critical ideas to his poetry. Finally, Dickey has also contributed to the critical disregard for his literary criticism through his own statements about what he has done. He has, for example, disavowed his first major collection of his reviews, Babel to Byzantium, as a “full-scale critical performance,” modestly asserting that he knows “any reasonably good student of aesthetics could tear [my] ‘ideas’ apart with no trouble.”² This pose of a dabbler has been held consistently in regard to his prose; Dickey's position has always been that his “preoccupation is with poetry, and everything else is a spin-off from that—novels, literary criticism, screen plays, whatever.”³

The reviews reprinted from the Sewanee Review in The Suspect in Poetry and in Babel to Byzantium are much less polemic than their reputation would suggest. When told of Robert Penn Warren's impression of his roughness on poets in his early days as a poetry reviewer, Dickey demurred: “Well, I'm not all that rough. I have a very naive feeling as a reviewer. I don't believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well. I always liked that about Randall Jarrell. He praised well. James Agee praises well. You've got to be able to like the right things to be enabled to dislike the wrong things.”⁴ What Dickey's statement about Jarrell ignores is that Jarrell's reputation in his early days as a reviewer was much the same as Dickey's own for roughness. Dickey's harsh reputation may have resulted from his ability to express his negative judgments wittily and memorably: “[J. V.] Cunningham is a good, deliberately small and authentic poet, a man with tight lips, a good education, and his own agonies. His handsome little book should be read, and above all by future Traditionalists and Compressors; he is their man.” (BB [Babel to Byzantium], 194).

Dickey is clearly not “their man” and he makes that abundantly clear. What he does like and praises well is less memorable, and his reasons are clear only when what he wrote then is read along with the essays in his later volume, Sorties. What he does not like in his early criticism is any kind of academicism, especially “the university-taught” garden variety poets or “the School of Charm” (BB, 10).

In his earliest Sewanee Review criticism Dickey stresses that the first step in restoring meaning to poetry is by compelling the reader's belief through establishing “the presence of a living being,” creating “a distinctive poetic voice” (BB, 107). Two other requirements are made of the poets he reviews. The poet must also earn belief, establish a connection between poet and reader, by making “effective statements, ones you believe, and believe in, at first sight …” (BB, 151). Dickey also prefers “a basis of narrative,” through describing or depicting “an action” in poetry, and regaining for poetry what it had lost to fiction (BB, 287).

BABEL TO BYZANTIUM: VISION AND FORM

The essays in The Suspect in Poetry and in Babel to Byzantium were written during the late 1950s and the early 1960s at a time when Randall Jarrell and Karl Shapiro were also in their different ways breaking with “new critical” formalism and the modernist tradition that had favored impersonality, mythology, and academicism in poetry. Dickey was in his own way nurturing the same seeds of change as Jarrell and Shapiro. Among the older generation of poets, William Carlos Williams, who had long had his differences with the Eliot brand of modernism, was an influence on the new directions being taken by Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell in the 1950s. Dickey also admired Williams at his best, but his view of Williams's poetry was somewhat different from theirs. Williams's best poems demonstrate how one can be close to the surfaces of life while avoiding the commonplace. The commonplace is clearly as foreign to Dickey's concept of good poetry as the university-oriented academicism of many modernist poets. Williams is better than his imitators because he transcends the commonplace by instant symbolization: his poetry has its magic “moments when a commonplace event or object is transfigured without warning …” (BB, 244).

Dickey not only demands that good poems of other poets be both nonacademic and nonliteral, but he also commends to his reader his own penchant for “‘the big basic forms’—rivers, mountains, woods, clouds, oceans …” (BB, 291). For Dickey it is the commitment to both “… vision and to the backbreaking craft of verse” that makes the good poet. His exemplars in this respect are Roethke, Rilke, and D. H. Lawrence, who are, he declares, the “great empathizers” and “the awakeners,” who can go beyond the commonplace and even “change your life” by compelling belief in what they write through “inducing you to believe that you were meant to perceive things” as they present them” (BB, 149). It is when poetry accomplishes this goal that it becomes the kind of magical thing Dickey believes it should be.

When Dickey attempts to describe the kind of substance he likes in poetry, he may owe something to the New Critics' praise of “tension” in poetry. Dickey's version is a preference for a tonal complexity that comes from a “sense of being glad to be alive to write that particular poem” but also from outrage at the possibility of the loss of all things that have meant much to him—a sense of “outrage that these personal, valuable things could ever be definitely lost for anyone” (BB, 281). In describing the poets he admires most, Dickey identifies his kind of tension. In Theodore Roethke the tension is the ability of Roethke to be “not far from total despair” but also “not far from total joy” (BB, 151); and in Edwin Arlington Robinson, the poet he admires almost equally with Roethke, it is his “desperately poised uncertainty” (BB, 223).

In a key essay in Babel to Byzantium, “The Poet Turns on Himself,” Dickey's concern is consistent with the emphasis in the essays in his later books, Self-Interviews and Sorties. It is in this essay that the significance of his title Babel to Byzantium becomes evident; each poet has his own vision, his vision of Byzantium. To actualize this vision he is dependent on a flow of images from the memory, even out of the subconscious, but it requires the right language and the proper form. Dickey clearly regards his own best poetic efforts and those of the poets he values the most as an attempt to find the language necessary to “incarnate” those moments which are “most persistent and obsessive” in the memory (BB, 292). Dickey was supportive of the new freedom in the poetry of the 1950s and the 1960s, but to earn his praise a poet must also be a craftsman who can maintain a proper balance between the passion of his visions and the formal demands of language. The poet must use his talent with language to find among the many tongues of Babel the right words for his Byzantium—the vision he desires to communicate. Unfortunately, as his brief reviews make clear, in his judgment, many contemporary poets fail at the one extreme or the other, producing either vision without the necessary craftsmanship or the craftsmanship without the vision. His reviews specify the failures.

SELF-INTERVIEWS

The most representative essay in Babel to Byzantium, revealing Dickey as almost as much the subject of his essays as the poet he is reviewing, is Dickey's essay on Randall Jarrell. Dickey conducts a dialogue with himself as critic, who responds intellectually and judgmentally to Jarrell's poetry, and as a poet, who responds emotionally and empathetically to Jarrell's successes and failures as a fellow poet.

A reviewer who had taken careful note of Dickey's Jarrell dialogue would have been less surprised by Dickey's next book of criticism, Self-Interviews (1970), than most of his reviewers were. This book of tape talk was the product of Dickey's response via tape recorder to questions about himself and his poetry asked by coeditors James and Barbara Reiss. The volume is slender, but seldom has a contemporary poet told more about himself as author than Dickey has in this volume and in his next, Sorties (1971). The confessionalism that Dickey had denied the poet seems more acceptable to him in his own prose. The dialogue in the Jarrell essay has become monologue, the distinctive voice of James Dickey speaking on himself, occasionally at his best, but also at his worst. Self-Interviews is nevertheless valuable as a handbook of information on Dickey as poet and as repudiation of T. S. Eliot's formalism, both his doctrine of impersonality for modern poetry and his practice of expressing his critical ideas in carefully crafted essays that advance the art of that form. Dickey also seems bent on rejecting another formalist tenet, dear to the New Critics, the intentional fallacy, their exposure as a fallacy the belief that a writer's own statements about his works can exhaust the possible meanings of those works. To New Critics like Cleanth Brooks or Robert Penn Warren nothing except a close explication of the literary text by a critic can reveal the actual meaning as opposed to the intended meaning. Self-Interviews is Dickey's testimony to his belief that a poet's statements about origins and personal meanings of a work can be of value in understanding it.

Part one of Self-Interviews, “The Poet at Mid-Career,” traces the development of Dickey's creative psyche from his earliest creative efforts to the publication of his first major collection, Poems 1957-1967. Part two, “The Poem as Something That Matters,” is divided into five sections, one for each of his first five volumes of poetry. The coverage is extensive: practically every major poem Dickey has written is discussed. Dickey is descriptive of his intentions; but he is seldom prescriptive about meanings, since he is not trying to preclude anybody else's interpretation. His accounts of the origins of his poems are anecdotal and entertaining re-creations of the creative act, such as Allen Tate undertook in his classic essay on his poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”

Self-Interviews is nevertheless a product of Dickey's staunch faith in his memory; it expresses his belief in the importance of drawing on and building on the best of his memories that come up from out of “that strange limbo between conscious memory and the unconscious, where remembered things have what physicists call a half-life” (SI [Self–Interviews], 55).

The informal autobiography of the mind of the poet that begins in Self-Interviews and continues in the “Journals” section of his next book, Sorties, is largely an account of the connections Dickey has made in his poetry and also of his convictions as poet-critic on how these connections are best made. He indicates that he has always desired to achieve “presentational immediacy” in his poetry in the belief that this quality would lead to the kind of reader involvement with poetry that good writers of prose fiction get. In his poetry the poet will be concerned with many disparate subjects, but he must present them concretely enough to communicate to his readers a convincing illusion that there is a connection among all the different strands of divergence.

Above all, Dickey stresses the importance of memory to the poet, and he unabashedly uses himself as his own exemplar. To Dickey the poet values “remembered things,” and he cannot bear to believe that they will ever “be totally expunged” (SI, 57). He writes his poems with the intention of preserving both the memories and the passion that they occasion which permit the creation of the poem. The memories are subject to the changes that linguistic structure may necessitate, and the poet's “censor” should eliminate what might be aesthetically bad. Beyond this Dickey will not go. He is entirely opposed to T. S. Eliot's antiromantic dictum that the poet must find objective correlatives and transmute his personal emotions into impersonal artistic feelings. On the contrary, Dickey has a neoromantic faith that emotions can lead to creativity. He declares: “I want to try to conserve the passion, wind it up tight like a spring so that it always has that sense of energy and compression, that latency which is always available to anyone who looks for it” (SI, 65). He desires to preserve the instinctual life that is left to civilized man, and he envies in animals the “instinctual notion of how much energy to expend, the ability to do a thing thoughtlessly and do it right …” (SI, 60). Dickey is a neoromantic in his faith and in instinctual life and a post-Darwinian poet in his belief in the possibility of regressing and regaining temporarily the instincts and extrarational powers that man has just about evolved out of. He imagines this possibility in his poetry and in his novel Deliverance. In Self-Interviews he proclaims his faith in this resource for his creative imagination: “There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone. By an act of will I can call up the whole past which includes telephones, but there is a half-dreaming, half-animal part of me that is fundamentally primitive. I really believe this, and I try to get it into poems; I don't think this quality should die out of people” (SI, 68-69).

One might say that James Dickey has his own version of the dissociation of sensibility between thought and feeling that preoccupied T. S. Eliot in his concern for the modern poet. Eliot saw a split between thought and feeling; Dickey sees modern man deprived of instinctual life. If this quality does die out of people, it will be a result of the premium contemporary society places on specialization. The price of specialization is “the loss of a sense of intimacy with the natural process” (SI, 68). For a more unified sensibility the poet must establish connections with the great mystery of process in nature, with “the great natural cycles of birth and death, the seasons, the growing up of plants and the dying of the leaves, the generations of animals and of men …” (SI, 68). It is this kind of connection that permits good poetry, in Dickey's view, to transcend the commonplace and become magical. Modernist poetry has been predominantly concerned with man in the modern wasteland, the city. The natural world is more important to Dickey than the man-made world. His Vanderbilt predecessors lamented the passing of an agrarian way of life in the South. Dickey laments with D. H. Lawrence that “as a result of our science and industrialization, we have lost the cosmos” (SI, 67).

SORTIES

The “Journals” section of Dickey's 1971 volume of essays, Sorties, is a continuation of the artistic self-analysis begun in Self-Interviews. There are, however, differences. The entries are in the form of scattered notes, and they are written at a time of actual engagement in creative work rather than in retrospect, as in Self-Interviews. The material is even more personal and intimate than in the previous volume, and as much as Dickey dislikes the term, even confessional.

Once more, Dickey deliberately avoids the formal critical performance, preferring to express his critical ideas in a more personal and intimate form than the formal critical essay permits. The form chosen is traditional, since notebooks and journals have always been an important part of a writer's creative activity even though not always intended for the public. It would not be accurate to say that Dickey does not write critical essays, for in Sorties he includes five essays written originally as lectures and for special occasions as well as a brief epilogue for the volume. Unfortunately, adverse critical responses to what seemed the deliberately egocentric presence of Dickey's own personality obscured for some reviewers the importance of the essays to an understanding of Dickey's intentions in his poetry and of his contributions to a postmodernist literary criticism. Sorties and Self-Interviews were seemingly just too much of a self-congratulatory ego trip through Dickey's own memories and critical prejudices to be taken seriously as literary criticism. The personality of Dickey in print had become almost as evident as in his enormously successful, though occasionally controversial, public readings. There was another reason for a definite note of hostility toward Dickey. As a southern poet who had not perceptibly participated in the protest movement against the war in Vietnam he had become suspect among liberals. The case against Dickey was presented by his former friend and the publisher of The Suspect in Poetry, Robert Bly.⁵ According to Webster a “sortie” is “a sally of troops from a besieged place against the besiegers.” Dickey had chosen the right title for another book of criticism. His new book and his reputation were both under minor siege. The quantity of Dickey's production of poetry, and in the view of some reviewers, the quality, too, had declined. Dickey was apparently giving too much of himself and writing too little of literary consequence. A judgment of contemporary criticism of poetry offered near the beginning of Sorties might be applied to his own work: “Contemporary criticism of poetry: far too much is made of far too little. The critic is attempting to be more ingenious and talented than the poem, and stands on his head to be original: that is, to invent an originality for the poems that can come to them only through him” (S [Sorties], 6).

The personal equation in Sorties is intentional, and it is of value for what it reveals about the relationship between Dickey and the critical personae that he has created. All the Dickey self-stances appear. There is the macho Dickey, who said that, if he is not an advocate of virility in contemporary literature, he would not object if assigned that role.⁶ He occasionally sounds like his own fictional creation, Lewis Medlock: “The body is the one thing you cannot fake. It is what it is, and it does what it does. It also fails to do what it cannot do. It would seem to me that people would realize this, especially men” (S, 4). He also appears as a Whitmanesque, intensified man as poet who would change his reader and even a good bit of his world:

What I want to do most as a poet is to charge the world with vitality: with the vitality that it already has, if we could rise to it. This vitality can be expressed in the smallest thing and in the largest; from the ant heaving at a grain of sand to the stars straining not to be extinguished.

(S, 5)

Whitman could not have asked for much more.

In striking contrast, Dickey also gives his reader a brief glimpse of a self he usually tries to conceal, that of the university professor who as a poet avoids writing academic poetry but who enjoys the professorial life. He confesses: “It is a marvelous thing, this having a house full of books. Something crosses the mind—a flash of light, some connection, some recognition—and one simply rises from one's chair and goes, as though by predestination, to that book, to that poem” (S, 5-6).

More often Dickey appears as one of the “roughs,” as a poet who prefers the open life and open forms in literature to the urban or academic life and to the closed forms preferred by modernists and formalists. He does not “like the locked-in quality of formalist verse.” Formalists desire the impression of coming “at an effect of inevitability. There are lots of other kinds of inevitability than this, and the best of these do not have the sense of claustrophobia that formalist verse has” (S, 8-9). Formalists prefer compression. Dickey makes his preference clear. “I want, mainly, the kind of poetry that opens out, instead of closes down” (S, 9).

Dickey may prefer open forms, and he admires “power” and a sense of “abandon” in poetry; but he never advocates uncontrolled or critically uncensored spontaneity. The neoromantic in Dickey may advocate openness and freedom; but the formalist, the worker with language, counters with the case for artistic control and careful craftsmanship. He tells himself to play with “confidence, power, and relaxation” and to add “abandon.” But then he adds as equally important: “To that, add precision” (S, 9). He urges himself to revise—to get it right: “Phrase it, phrase it. One cannot work too much on such a thing” (S, 10).

In still another Whitmanesque stance Dickey extols his own poetic sensibility, assuring himself that he has a greater “accessibility to experience” than even Henry James ever had and affirming his memory for those things which mean something to him. He offers himself as an example of what in the personality of a writer makes him a writer. He is his own representative poet, “born with some kind of extra sensitivity to things” and capacity “to receive impressions” and to retain them because “they mean something to him.” Things “matter” to him; he feels for them and remembers them (S, 20-21).

Not all is egotism or egocentric. Dickey is aware of writing, after a period of critical formalism, on the personality of the poet in relation to his works in a great romantic tradition, part Wordsworthian self-analysis of the mind of the poet and part Whitmanesque assertion of the importance of the self in a poetry in which a celebration of life is still possible.

Part II of Sorties consists of Dickey's largest collection of critical essays so far, six in all, and a brief epilogue. Two essays were talks given while Dickey was poetry consultant at the Library of Congress—“Metaphor as Pure Adventure” and “Spinning the Crystal Ball.” Two are reprints of reviews of biographies, of Louis Coxe's biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson,⁷ and of Allen Seager's biography of Theodore Roethke.⁸ These reviews are as much concerned with the poet as with poetry. The remaining two essays, “The Self as Agent” and “The Son, the Cave, and the Burning Bush,” were originally included in anthologies.⁹ In all of these essays the approach is personal and subjective, with little or no objective explication of poetic texts. The reader is given instead Dickey's opinions, which come more from his interests as a poet than from his role as a literary critic. Dickey is obviously expanding on ideas and judgments he has made in his previous interviews and reviews. The difference in Sorties is his concern for the lives, the individual existential situations, of the poets he considers compared to their goals and accomplishments, a subject that had much personal meaning for Dickey himself in the 1970s as his poetic output began to slow down. He is struck by the contradictions between the affirmative in the poems and the destructiveness in the lives of the poets.

The final essay in Sorties is one of Dickey's best. “The Self as Agent” is a significant essay on a subject of great importance to Dickey as an opponent of impersonality in poetry—the role of the self in the poem. The view here is not exactly unbridled romanticism. Dickey's romantic tendencies are once more moderated by his Vanderbilt New Critical heritage. Form is important, as is content. The “I” in the poem is more than the ordinary self. The poet's obligation is not just to tell the literal truth but rather to “make” his truth so that “the vision of the poem will impose itself on the reader as more memorable and value-laden than the actuality it is taken from” (S, 156). The theme of participation in the poem by both poet and reader is restated. His emphasis here is on what the poem does for the poet more than for the reader. A good poem is also a participation in a self-discovery. “During the writing of the poem the poet comes to feel that he is releasing into its proper field of response a portion of himself he has never really understood” (S, 157). The self is essential in the poem because it is the agent that helps the poet to “discover” his poem. Dickey's preference is for the I-poem and the I-narration because the poet in Dickey's view “is capable of inventing or bringing to light out of himself a very large number of I-figures to serve in different poems …” (S, 161). For the poet “the chief glory and excitement of writing poetry” comes from this “chance to confront and dramatize parts of himself that otherwise would not have surfaced” (S, 161). The poet is providing for his reader, through participating in a self-discovery, a sensation of emotional truth. Poetry is a kind of experiential knowledge: the poet “has a new or insufficiently known part of himself released,” and he is able to convey this knowledge convincingly to the reader as humanly important emotional truth (S, 161). If Dickey does not quite provide the rationale for such theories, appropriately for a critic who values personality, he does reiterate his personal beliefs with the conviction that comes from the experience of his own practice.

Dickey's literary criticism is a criticism of fragments—short reviews, brief introductions, public lectures, interviews, self-interviews tape recorded. He has expressed consistent attitudes, though he has not attempted to organize his critical essays as clearly around a theme, as Allen Tate, Karl Shapiro, and Randall Jarrell have done with a greater consistency. He does not rank poets though he gives candid judgments of individual poets; nor is Dickey the spokesman for any kind of great tradition in modern poetry as his Vanderbilt predecessors Tate, Brooks, and Warren were. A comparison with Randall Jarrell is apt because Dickey admired Jarrell and because, like Dickey, Jarrell broke with formalist theory and practice, restored the poet to the poem and the personality of the critic to literary criticism. Jarrell, in Poetry and the Age, and Dickey, consistently in his criticism, desire the readers to be participants in the poems they read.

Dickey's criticism is pertinent to postmodernism in poetry and to postformalism in criticism. His approach to criticism is subjective, not objective and hermeneutical, and his view of the poem is as a dramatization of unrealized aspects of the ego of the poet rather than as a self-contained or autotelic artifact. Dickey has been a determined spokesman for connections between the author and his poem without deteriorating into a poetry of literalism or of commonplaces. He seeks significant connections between persona of the poem and the reader that can compel belief in a transcendence of the ordinary limitations of the self. He is aware of the destructive forces in nature, but he regards himself as a poet like Theodore Roethke, as a celebrator of life. If Dickey is a believer in possibilities of meaning in art and in life, he is also aware of the dangers of a complete surrender to the instincts and to the emotions—of becoming like “unthinking nature.” If he is neoromantic in his preference for open forms and in his penchant for personality, he is also an advocate of balance between the demands of form and the freedom required for inspiration. In short, Dickey is for Dionysian passion but also for Apollonian control.

James Dickey's favorite myth seems to be that of Orpheus. He has used it in his poetry and in his novel Deliverance. There is also a kind of orphic stance in his literary criticism. He has a strong sense of the mission of the poet as the one with the power to make things happen in the imagination of his readers. Yet his poet, and he is his own chief example, is a grateful survivor of chaos who can still be a celebrant of life in spite of the inevitable “dismemberments” of men, not by Thracian women but by war, age, and disease.

Dickey's poems of the 1970s, though few in number, suggest a change to more objective personae who are not Dickey himself but others who serve as surrogates. Because he has written very few critical essays in the 1970s, there is no comparable discernible shift from his consistent advocacy of the subjective in poetry to championing anything like “objective correlatives” for personal feelings, although the critical essays he has written recently are less personal, less controversial, and less significant than the earlier ones.

In 1979 Dickey gave a lecture at the University of Idaho on Ezra Pound. Earlier Dickey had tended to lump Pound with Eliot as a modernist who sought to give his readers not himself but culture. Dickey's revaluation is similar to the current revisionist view that sees Pound still as an influence on Eliot and on modernism but also as an influence on a much less impersonal and freer postmodernism. What he now finds valuable is not the “academic Pound of quotation and cultural cross-reference” but rather the Pound of “the amazing image,” “the fresh clean language,” and “the sound of a voice saying something simple and extraordinary” with the tone “of a delivered truth.”¹⁰ What Dickey finds of use in this Pound is not “the shock of recognition” but “the shock of possibility.”

It is the tiny essay in the privately published Billy Goat that makes clear James Dickey's continuing commitment to his version of a Whitmanesque role for the poet, an intensified poet who establishes the necessary connections to make possible an intensified reader. There has been a slight change in terminology. He now desires an “energized man,” nothing as sensational as a man “like a creature from another planet, giving off strange rays of solar energy,” but simply “a human creature, like you, like me—like you could be, like I like to think I could be.”¹¹

The existential literature of three decades ago was once described as “the literature of possibility.”¹² That phrase would be apt for a description of the kind of freedom that James Dickey desires for poets today, certainly for himself.

Notes

1. Warren's comment is discussed in Franklin Ashley, “James Dickey: The Art of Poetry,” Paris Review 65 (Spring 1976):70.

2. James Dickey, Babel to Byzantium (New York, 1968), p. ix. Dickey has frequently repeated this comment. Neither in writings nor in public readings does he refer to himself as a critic.

3. Ashley, “James Dickey,” p. 81.

4. Ibid., p. 170.

5. Bly, “The Collapse of James Dickey,” pp. 70-79.

6. Kizer and Boatwright, “A Conversation with James Dickey,” pp. 3-28.

7. James Dickey, “The Greatest American Poet,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1968, pp. 53-58.

8. James Dickey, “The Poet of Secret Lives and Misspent Opportunities,” New York Times Book Review, 18 May 1969, pp. 1, 10.

9. James Dickey, “The Self as Agent,” in The Great Ideas Today, ed. Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968), pp. 91-97; James Dickey, “The Son, the Cave, and the Burning Bush,” in The Young American Poets, ed. Paul Carroll (Chicago: Follett; Big Table, 1968), pp. 7-19.

10. James Dickey, The Water-Bug's Mittens: Ezra Pound: What We Can Use (Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli Clark, 1980), p. 15.

11. James Dickey, Billy Goat 2 (Clemson, S.C.: Billy Goat Press, 1979), p. 3.

12. See Hazel Barnes, Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959).