[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 poet's “personality” in its relationships to the worlds of nature and of experience. His work is rarely confessional in the sense of the term as we have come to know it, yet it is always personal—at times contemplative, at times dramatic. Because Dickey has become so controversial in recent years, his incredible lyric and dramatic talent has not been adequately recognized, and his ceaseless, often monomaniacal questioning of identity, of the self, of that mysterious and elusive concept we call the personality, has not been investigated.

Yet this is only natural: it is always the fate of individuals who give voice to an era's hidden, atavistic desires, its “taboos,” to be controversial and therefore misunderstood. Dickey's poetry is important not only because it is so skillful, but because it expresses, at times unintentionally, a great deal about the American imagination in its response to an increasingly complex and “unnatural” phase of civilization. (To Dickey mental processes have come to seem “unnatural” in contrast to physical acts: hence the “Hell” of the quote from his journal, Sorties.) He has said, quite seriously, that “the world, the human mind, is dying of subtlety. What it needs is force” (Sorties, Garden City, New York, 1971; p. 85). His imagination requires the heroic. But the world cannot and will not always accommodate the hero, no matter how passionately he believes he has identified himself with the fundamental, secret rhythms of nature itself. One comes to loathe the very self that voices its hopeless demands, the “I” that will not be satisfied and will never be silent. I myself am hell is a philosophical statement, though it is expressed in the poetic language of personal emotion.

The volumes of poetry Dickey has published so far—Into the Stone (1960), Drowning with Others (1962), Helmets (1964), Buckdancer's Choice (1965), The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970)—present a number of hypothetical or experimental personae, each a kind of reincarnation of an earlier consciousness through which the “self” of the poet endures. He moves, he grows, he suffers, he changes, yet he is still the same—the voice is a singular one, unmistakable. It asks why, knowing the soul heroic, the man himself is so trapped, so helpless? Dickey's central theme is the frustration that characterizes modern man, confronted with an increasingly depersonalized and intellectualized society—the frustration and its necessary corollary, murderous rage. Dickey is not popular with liberals. Yet one can learn from him, as from no other serious writer, what it is like to have been born into one world and to have survived into another. It might be argued that Dickey is our era's Whitman, but a Whitman subdued, no longer innocent, baptized by American violence into the role of a “killer/victim” who cannot locate within his society any standards by which his actions may be judged. A personality eager to identify itself with the collective, whether nature or other men, can survive only when the exterior world supports that mystical union of subject and object. Dickey speaks from the inside of our fallen, contaminated, guilt-obsessed era, and he speaks its language.

This was not always so: his earliest poems are lyric and meditative. They present a near-anonymous sensitivity, one hypnotized by forms, by Being in which dramatic and ostensibly intolerable truths are resolved by a formal, ritualistic—essentially magical—imagination into coherent and well-defined unities; his later poems submit this sensitivity to a broken, overheated, emotionally and intellectually turbulent world. The “stoneness” of the first volume undergoes an astonishing variety of metamorphoses until, in “The Eye-Beaters” and “Turning Away: Variations on Estrangement,” it emerges as stark, isolated, combative self-consciousness, in which “A deadly, dramatic compression / Is made of the normal brow. …” The poet begins as Prospero, knowing all and forgiving all, and, through a series of sharply tested modes of perception, comes to seem like Hamlet of the great, tragic soliloquies.

Who can tell us more about ourselves?—about our “American,” “masculine,” most dangerous selves? Even more than Whitman, Dickey contains multitudes; he cannot be reproached for the fact that some of these aspects of a vast, complex self are at war with the others. He experiments with the art of poetry and with the external world and the relationships it offers him (will he be lover?—murderer?—observer?), but what is most moving about his work is his relentless honesty in regard to his own evolving perception of himself, the mystery of his “personality.” He refuses to remain in any explored or conquered territory, either in his art or in his personality. Obsessed with the need to seek and to define, he speaks for those who know that the universe is rich with meaning but are not always able to relate the intellectual, conscious aspect of their natures to it. Thus, the need to reject the “conscious” mind and its public expression, civilization itself, which is so disturbing in Dickey. Indeed, Sorties is very nearly a confession of despair—the poet seems unable to integrate the various aspects of his nature, conceiving of the world of the intellect and art as “Hell.” “Believe me, it is better to be stupid and ordinary,” Dickey tells us early in the book. What such a temperament requires, however, is not less intelligence, but more.

Dickey has not always expressed himself in such extreme terms, and he has been, all along, a careful craftsman, knowing that meaning in poetry must be expressed through language, through a system of mental constructs. In fact, it must be invented anew with each poem; it must be rigorously contracted, abbreviated, made less explosive and less primitive. In an excellent essay in The Suspect in Poetry he cautions young poets against abandoning themselves to their unconscious “song,” which he defines as “only a kind of monstrousness that has to be understood and ordered according to some principle to be meaningful.”¹ The unrestrained and unimagined self must be related syntactically to the external world in order to achieve meaning.

Yet the phenomenal world changes; language shifts, evolves, breaks free of its referents; and the human ego, mysteriously linked to both, is forced to undergo continuous alterations in order simply to survive. In the poem “Snakebite” (1967) the “stage of pine logs” and the “role / I have been cast in” give way suddenly and horribly to the dramatic transition from the pronoun “it” to the pronoun “me” as the poet realizes he is confined in his living, breathing, existential body: he is not playing a role after all. If he wants to survive he will have to drain that poison out of his blood stream. Therefore, one of the burdens of the poet's higher awareness is to discover if there is any metamorphosis, any possible reincarnation, that is ultimately more than a mode of perception, a way of arranging words. Otherwise we begin to imagine ourselves as totally “estranged.” To deny that estrangement we must deny our very framework of perception—language and sanity and logic—as if, by annihilating the mental construct of incarnation, we might somehow experience it on a level far below consciousness. Certainly Dickey has emphasized the poem as physical experience; he has set up opposing pseudocategories of the poetry of “participation” and the poetry of “reflection” (Sorties, p. 59). Such an estrangement rests, however, upon the metaphysical assumption that man's intellect is an intruder in the universe and that the language systems he has devised are not utterly natural, natural to his species. Surely the human invention or creation of language is our species' highest achievement; some psycholinguists speculate that human beings are born with a genetic endowment for recognizing and formulating language, that they “possess genes for all kinds of information, with strands of special, peculiarly human DNA for the discernment of meaning in syntax.”² Failing to accept the intellect as triumphantly human, rather than somehow unnatural, the poet is doomed to endless struggles with the self. The “variations on estrangement” at the end of The Eye-Beaters deal with countless battles and meadows strewn “with inner lives,” concluding with the hope that the poet's life may be seen “as a thing / That can be learned, / As those earnest young heroes learned theirs, / Later, much later on.”

An objective assessment of one's situation must be experienced apart from life itself, then. And only “much later on.” To use a critical term Dickey appropriated from Wordsworth, he is a poet of the “Second Birth,” not one who, like Rimbaud or Dylan Thomas, possessed a natural instrument for poetry but one who eventually reduces the distinction between “born” and “made” poets only by hard work, by the “ultimate moral habit of trying each poem, each line, each word, against the shifting but finally constant standards of inner necessity” (The Suspect in Poetry, pp. 55-57). Contrary to his instinct for direct, undiluted self-expression, the poet has tried to define and develop his own personality as a “writing instrument”; he has pared back, reduced, restrained the chaotic “monstrousness” of raw emotion in order to relate his unique experience to common experience. He contradicts Eliot's ideal of an impersonal poetry, yet paradoxically refuses to endorse what he would call the monstrousness of confessional verse: “The belief in the value of one's personality has all but disappeared. …”

But what is personality, that a belief in it might save us?

Not a multileveled phenomenon, Dickey's sense of “personality,” but rather a series of imagined dramas, sometimes no more than flashes of rapport, kinships with beasts or ancient ancestors—as in the apocalyptic “The Eye-Beaters,” in which personality is gained only when “Reason” is rejected in favor of primitive action. The process of increasing self-consciousness, as image after image is explored, held up like a mask to the poet's face,³ absorbed, and finally discarded, comes to seem a tragic movement, as every existential role in the universe must ultimately be abandoned.

“INTACT AND INCREDIBLE LOVE”

Dickey has said that the century's greatest phrase is Albert Schweitzer's “reverence for life.” This conviction runs through his work but is strongest in the earliest volumes. Into the Stone consists of contemplative, almost dreamlike poems that investigate the poet's many forms of love: beginning with the mythical, incantatory dissolution of the individual personality into both “dark” and “light” and concluding with the book's title poem, which emphasizes the poet's confident “knowing” and his being “known” through his relationship with a woman.

“Sleeping Out at Easter” is terse, restrained, as the “Word rising out of darkness” seems to act without the deliberate involvement of the poet. As dawn arrives in the forest, the “Presences” of night turn into trees and “One eye opens slowly without me.” Everything moves in its own placid, nonpersonalized pattern, out of darkness and into the sunlight, and the world is “made good” by the springing together of wood and sun. The metamorphosis of Presences into daytime trees is one that could occur without the poet's song, yet the poet voices a total acceptance, as if he knew himself uniquely absorbed in the cycle of night/day, his “magical shepherd's cloak … not yet alive on [his] flesh.” In other, similarly incantatory poems, the poet lies at the edge of a well, contemplating himself and his smile and the “grave face” of his dead brother, or lies “in ritual down” in a small unconsecrated grove of suburban pines—trying to get back, to get down, beneath both gods and animals, to “being part of the acclaimed rebirth” of spring (“The Vegetable King”). (Years later, when his poetry has undergone tremendous changes, Dickey will deal again with the transformation of a human being into a tree, in “The Fiend,” one of his most eccentric poems).

Into the Stone contains a number of war poems, but in spite of their subject they absorb the poet's personality much as the nature poems do, locating in confusion and panic certain centers of imagination, of decision, that the poet is able to recall years later, when “at peace.” “The Enclosure” is the first of Dickey's many poems that “enclose” and idealize women: a group of war nurses on a Philippine island are protected by a compound with a wire fence, but the poet imagines them whispering to the soldiers outside “to deliver them out / Of the circle of impotence. …” In lines of curious, ceremonial calm the poet declares how, after the war, this vision led him to “fall / On the enemy's women / With intact and incredible love.” Of the war poems, the most vivid is “The Performance,” which celebrates the paradox of pain and triumph in the memory of David Armstrong, executed by the Japanese; Dickey remembers Armstrong doing a handstand against the sun, and his death by decapitation is seen as another kind of “performance.” Even here there is a sense of acquiescence, finality, as if the cycle of nature could absorb this violent death as easily as it could absorb the shapes of trees back into primordial Presences.

The reverential awe of “Trees and Cattle” places the poet's consciousness in a “holy alliance” with trees, cattle, and sunlight, making his mind a “red beast”—his head gifted with ghostly bull's horns by the same magic that allowed Lawrence to imagine his head “hard-balanced, antlered” in “A Doe at Evening”; the sun itself burns more deeply because trees and cattle exist. A miracle of some kind has occurred, though it cannot be explained, and the poet half believes he may be saved from death; as, in a later poem, “Fog Envelops the Animals,” the poet-hunter is somehow transformed into the “long-sought invisibility” of pure things or events or processes: “Silence. Whiteness. Hunting.” But Into the Stone is characterized by passivity and no hint of the guilty, pleasurable agitation of physical life, whether hunting or love; the title poem describes the poet “on the way to a woman,” preoccupied with a mystical absorption into the “stone” of the moon. The woman is outside the concern of the poem, undefined, not even mythologized; the poet is not vividly portrayed, as in “Cherrylog Road”; he could be any man, any lover, believing that “the dead have their chance in my body.” All is still, mysterious, calm. The poet “knows” his place and his love, quite unlike the moon-drawn men of a later poem, “Apollo,” who are seen as floating “on nothing / But procedure alone” and who symbolize “all humanity in the name / Of a new life. …” This later poem makes the “stone” of the moon into “stones,” breaks up a seamless cosmology into a universe of “craters” and “mountains the animal / Eye has not seen since the earth split” (the earth-moon split an ancient and honored moon theory, of obvious symbolic, if not scientific, value)—not the Platonic oneness of stone, but stones:

                                                            … We stare into the moon
dust, the earth-blazing ground. We laugh, with the beautiful craze
                                                  Of Static. We bend, we pick up stones.

(“Apollo”)

A more dramatic sense of self is evident in Dickey's second book, Drowning with Others. Here he imagines the torturous memories of a lifeguard who failed to save a drowning child; he imagines himself inside the hunting dream of a dog sleeping on his feet; he contemplates fish in “The Movement of Fish” with the alert, awed scrutiny of Lawrence himself, making a judgment, like Lawrence's, that arises from the distant Otherness of the fish's world, where its sudden movement has the power to “convulse the whole ocean” and teach man the Kierkegaardian terror of the leap, the “fear and trembling” of great depths that are totally still, far beneath the superficial agitation that men see or float upon in their boats.

Yet the hunted/hunting animals of “The Heaven of Animals” are poetic constructions, Platonic essences of beasts wholly absorbed in a mythical cycle of life-death-rebirth: at the very center of nature these beasts “tremble,” “fall,” “are torn,” “rise,” and “walk again,” like Emerson's red slayer and his perpetual victim. “The Heaven of Animals” is all but unique in Dickey's poetry because the poet himself has no clear position in it, as if its unity of Being somehow excluded an active intellectual consciousness; if we look back at the poem from “Fog Envelops the Animals” and other hunting poems and from Dickey's statements in Self-Interviews (Garden City, New York, 1970) about the mysterious “renewal” he experiences when hunting, we can assume that his deepest sympathies are with the predators, but this is not evident from the poem itself, which is one of his finest, most delicate achievements. The owl of “The Owl King” is another poetic (and not naturalistic) creature, a form of the poet himself who sits “in my shape / With my claws growing deep into wood / And my sight going slowly out, / Inch by inch. …” Superior forces belong to those who, like the owl, can see in the dark; or to those who, like Dickey himself, possess extraordinary powers of vision⁴ that set them apart from other, average men. But the forces are benevolent, godly, and restrained—the owl king participates in a mysterious ceremony with the blind child “as beasts at their own wedding, dance” and is not the symbol of cold, savage violence of the owl perched upon the tent in Deliverance, just as the poet-narrator of the volume Drowning with Others is not the helplessly eager murderer of Deliverance. Here, in the owl king's Roethkian kingdom, all nature is transformed by mind, its brutal contingencies and dreams suppressed, the possible “monstrousness” of its song made into a childlike lyric. Its final stanzas link it to earlier poems of Dickey's in which tension has been resolved by an act of impersonal, godly will:

Far off, the owl king
Sings like my father, growing
In power. Father, I touch
Your face. I have not seen
My own, but it is yours.
I come, I advance,
I believe everything, I am here.

Through the child's (blind) acceptance, Dickey accepts the world; just as, in the anguished “The Eye-Beaters,” he rejects the world of normal, rational vision, having been shaken by the experience of seeing blind children beat at their eyes in order to “see.” In “The Owl King” the transcendent, paternal bird withdraws into the darkness of his own vision, while the lost child's father emerges, “In love with the sound of my voice,” to claim his child; both aspects of the poetic consciousness are required if the child is to be saved, cherished, and yet both are dependent upon the child's acquiescence. (Just as, for the hunter, the imagined “acquiescence” of the hunted—the slain—is a ritualistic necessity; see Dickey's attempted justification of his love of hunting in Self-Interviews). This poem is a “song of innocence” whose unearthly simplicity—the child moves from tree to tree as if blessing them—will be transformed, years later, into the nightmarish “song of experience” of the crazed blind children in “The Eye-Beaters.” Then, the objects of the poet's pity being, in themselves, hopeless, not even human children, beyond all love or language, the poet himself will narrowly escape madness. But this is years later, years deeper into flesh.

ENTERING HISTORY

In his third book, Helmets, Dickey begins to move out of the perfected world of eternal recurrence, no longer the awed, alert, but essentially passive observer, now ready to experience history. It is clear that Dickey desires to take on “his” own personal history as an analogue to or a microcosmic exploration of twentieth-century American history, which is one of the reasons he is so important a poet. In his inspired, witty, and ingeniously balanced essay on Randall Jarrell in The Suspect in Poetry, Dickey says he can discover in Jarrell's poetry very little excellence of technique, but he insists that Jarrell's contribution—“that of writing about real things, rather than playing games with words”—is a valuable one. Dickey indicates implicitly that he will take on both the challenge of being an artist and a historian of our era, which he has, applying a superior poetic talent to Jarrell's “realm … of pity and terror … a kind of non-understanding understanding, and above all of helplessness.”⁵

Once he is released from the sacred but bloodless cycle of nature, Dickey is concerned with giving life to this “non-understanding understanding” of creatures simpler than himself, or of an earlier form of himself, as in the beautiful, perfect poem, “Drinking from a Helmet.” In “The Dusk of Horses” the emphasis has shifted from acceptance to a sharper awareness of distinctions between self and object, the need for the human participant in an action to judge it:

No beast ever lived who understood
What happened among the sun's fields,
Or cared why the color of grass
Fled over the hill while he stumbled,
Led by the halter to sleep
On his four taxed, worthy legs. …

(“The Dusk of Horses”)

In this and similar poems in Helmets the graceful fluidity of the lines is like the fluidity of the earlier poems: the god's-eye vision set to music. As the theme of “helplessness” grows, however, Dickey loses interest in well-made and sweetly sounding poetry and pours his remarkable energies into such extravaganzas of shouts and shrieks as “May Day Sermon.” And where death might once have been resolved by a mystical affirmation of unity, in the recent poem “Diabetes” it is resolved by a surreptitious drink of beer; in “The Cancer Match,” by whiskey.

Throughout Helmets there is an increasing growth, as if the subjects long loved by the poet are now shifting out of the hypnosis of love itself, beginning to elude his incantatory powers: coming alive and separate. In a poem reminiscent of Wallace Stevens' “Anecdote of the Jar,” Dickey stands by a fence with his palm on the top wire and experiences a vision or a nervous hallucination of the disorder that would result if the tension of the wire were broken:

If the wire were cut anywhere
All his blood would fall to the ground
And leave him standing and staring
With a face as white as a Hereford's. …

(“Fence Wire”)

The “top tense strand” is like a guitar string “tuned to an E,” whose humming sound arranges the acres of the farm and holds them “highstrung and enthralled.” Suddenly the poet in his human role must accept a position in nature which is superior to that of trees and cattle, an intellectual responsibility that will involve both exultation and the risk of despair. But because of Dickey's hand on this fence wire,

The dead corn is more
Balanced in death than it was,
The animals more aware
Within the huge human embrace
Held up and borne out of sight
Upon short, unbreakable poles
Where through the ruled land intones
Like a psalm. …

Because of the sensational aspects of some of his later poems, Dickey is not usually known to have concerned himself so seriously, and so perceptively, with the metaphysics behind aesthetic action; it is characteristic of his energy and his pursuit of new challenges that a very few poems about “poetry” are enough for him. If read in its proper chronological place in Dickey's work, “Fence Wire” is a moving as well as a significant poem; it is the first clear statement of the poet's sense of himself as involved responsibly in history. In his most powerful poems the tension between that “top thread tuned to an E” and the abandonment to one's own possible, probable “monstrousness” provides a dramatic excitement generally lacking in these early, though entirely admirable poems, and less content with lyric verse itself, Dickey will experiment with wildly imaginative monologues in which words float and leap all over the page.

In Helmets there is also a new sense of exploration into an “Otherness,” not a declaring of unities, analogues, “correspondences” between all phenomena in nature: Dickey stands “At Darien Bridge” and muses upon the chain-gang workers who built the bridge many years ago, when he was a child; he hopes to see a bird, the one bird “no one has looked for,” and the scratched wedding band on his finger recalls the convicts' chains—like them, he longs for freedom, or even death, or at least the ability to believe again in “the unchanging, hopeless look / Out of which all miracles leap.” (In contrast to the miraculous vision of “Trees and Cattle.”) In “Chenille” he encounters another kind of poet, an old woman who darns quilts endlessly, not ordinary bedspreads of the kind made by machine and sold in the normal world but quilts decorated with red whales, unicorns, winged elephants, crowned ants—“Beasts that cannot be thought of / By the wholly sane.” Increasingly, the surreal intrudes into what should be the real, or sane; in “On the Cosawattee” Dickey and his companion on a canoeing trip are shocked to see how the water has been defiled by a poultry-processing plant upstream:

All morning we floated on feathers
Among the drawn heads which appeared
Everywhere, from under the logs
Of feathers, from upstream behind us,
Lounging back to us from ahead,
Until we believed ourselves doomed
And the planet corrupted forever. …

Though the two men shoot the rapids and finally escape this horror, the canoeists of Deliverance return to experience the river's mysterious dangers and the unhuman ground-bass of sound that becomes “deeper and more massively frantic and authoritative” as they continue—and this time not all will survive, and none will get back to civilization with anything like this poem's triumphant declaration of the human ability to escape other human defilement. In the blaze of noon the canoeists on the Coosawattee River feel:

The quickening pulse of the rapids
And entered upon it like men
Who sense that the world can be cleansed
Among rocks pallid only with water,
And plunged there like the unborn
Who see earthly streams without taint
Flow beneath them. …

“Cherrylog Road” is the first of the unmistakable Dickeyesque poems: nostalgic and comic simultaneously, demystifying the love so laboriously mystified elsewhere, even naming names (“Doris Holbrook”) and giving directions:

Off Highway 106
At Cherrylog Road I entered
The '34 Ford without wheels,
Smothered in kudzu,
With a seat pulled out to run
Corn whiskey down from the hills. …

And in this automobile graveyard the boy moves from car to car, delighted to be naming, placing, experiencing, without the need to make anything sacred or even essentially important: from the Ford to an Essex to a blue Chevrolet to a Pierce-Arrow, “as in a wild stock-car race / In the parking lot of the dead. …” He hopes his girl friend will come to him from her father's farm “And … get back there / With no trace of me on her face”; when she does arrive and they embrace, their love-making takes place in the same “stalled, dreaming traffic” as the hunting of mice by blacksnakes, and beetles soon reclaim the field of the car's seat springs. The narrator leaves on his motorcycle, which is unglamorized, “Like the soul of the junkyard / Restored, a bicycle fleshed / With power”—an earlier, more convincing version of the spectacular “May Day Sermon.”

“The Poisoned Man” deals with the same situation explored in a later poem, “Snakebite” (from Falling, in Poems 1957-1967) in which the victim of a poisonous snake is forced to cut himself with a knife in order to drain out the poison. In the earlier poem a formal, almost allegorical meaning evolves from the terrifying experience; the poet has a kind of vision, feeling that his heart's blood could flow “Unendingly out of the mountain. …” “Snakebite” reduces this visionary abstraction to “I have a problem with / My right foot and my life.” Aging, the poet is urgently concerned with survival itself; he has called himself a poet of “survival.” In another poem about snakes, “Goodbye to Serpents,” Dickey and his son observe snakes in a Parisian zoo, and Dickey tries to concentrate on them as he never has in the past. His meditation is so complete that he seems to pass into them, seeing the human world of towers and churches and streets “All old, all cold with my gaze. …” and he longs to believe that he has somehow retained, at the same time, his own human presence, the human miracles of “self” and “love.” But it is a failure:

And I know I have not been moved
Enough by the things I have moved through,
And I have seen what I have seen
Unchanged, hypnotized, and perceptive. …

Unchanged, hypnotized, and perceptive: a strange combination of words. But in the first of Dickey's “reincarnation” poems in a later volume, Buckdancer's Choice, he becomes a snake with head “poisonous and poised.” Perhaps he is suggesting that the very awe of nature that mesmerized him has prevented his being “moved” humanly by the things he has experienced. The mystic's world of total acceptance has always contrasted sharply with the world of human suffering.

Helmets concludes with one of Dickey's most remarkable poems, the little-discussed “Drinking from a Helmet.” The young narrator, in wartime, drinks from a helmet he picked up near his foxhole and sways “as if kissed in the brain,” standing

… as though I possessed
A cool, trembling man
Exactly my size, swallowed whole.

He throws down his own helmet and puts on the one he has found, an inheritance from the dead. Then he seems to “see” in his own brain the dying man's last thought—a memory of two boys, the soldier and his older brother in a setting of tremendous trees “That would grow on the sun if they could. …” Where “Approaching Prayer” traced what seemed to be the poet's conscious effort to imagine a dying hog's experience, “Drinking from a Helmet” seems sheer unwilled vision:

                                                                      I saw a fence
And two boys facing each other,
Quietly talking,
Looking in at the gigantic redwoods,
The rings in the trunks turning slowly
To raise up stupendous green.
I would survive and go there,
Stepping off the train in a helmet
That held a man's last thought,
Which showed him his older brother
Showing him trees.
I would ride through all
California upon two wheels
Until I came to the white
Dirt road where they had been,
Hoping to meet his blond brother,
And to walk with him into the wood
Until we were lost,
Then take off the helmet
And tell him where I had stood,
What poured, what spilled, what swallowed:
And tell him I was the man.

The relationship between the two brothers is interesting, because it reverses the relationship of Dickey and his own older brother, who evidently died before Dickey was born. (See “The Underground Stream,” “The String,” and other poems in which the “tall cadaver” of the brother is summoned up by the poet, who believes himself conceived by his parents “out of grief” and brought to life “To replace the incredible child” who had died. The psychologically disastrous results of such a belief, if sincere, hardly need to be examined; one is always a “survivor,” always “guilty,” and always conscious of being an inferior substitute for some superior being.) Here, the younger brother has died and Dickey himself will go to visit the surviving older brother, as if, somehow, both he and his older brother were living and able to speak to each other; a life-affirming magic, in spite of a young soldier's death.

MONSTERS

After Helmets Dickey's poetry changes considerably. The colloquial tone and unserious rhythms of “Cherrylog Road” are used for deadly serious purposes as Dickey explores hypothetical selves and the possibility of values outside the human sphere. Where in an early poem like “The Performance” a mystical placidity rendered even a brutal execution into something observed, now most actions, most states of being, are examined bluntly, brutally, emotionally, as the poet subjects himself to raw life without the sustaining rituals of Being.

Dickey has many extraordinary poems, fusions of “genius” and “art,” but the central poem of his work seems to be “The Firebombing,” from Buckdancer's Choice. No reader, adjusted to the high, measured art of Dickey's first three volumes, can be ready for this particular poem; it is unforgettable, and seems to me an important achievement in our contemporary literature, a masterpiece that could only have been written by an American, and only by Dickey.

“The Firebombing” is an eight-page poem of irregular lines, abrupt transitions and leaps, stanzas of varying length, connected by suburban-surreal images, a terrifying visionary experience endured in a “well-stocked pantry.” Its effort is to realize, to feel, what the poet did twenty years before as a participant in an “anti-morale raid” over Japan during the closing months of World War II. Its larger effort is to feel guilt and finally to feel anything. One of the epigraphs to the poem is from the Book of Job: “Or hast thou an arm like God?” This is Dickey's ironic self-directed question, for it is he, Dickey, the homeowner / killer, the Job / God, who has tried on the strength of vast powers and has not been able to survive them. Irony is something altogether new in Dickey:

Homeowners unite.
All families lie together, though some are burned alive.
The others try to feel
For them. Some can, it is often said.

The detachment is not godly, but despairing. Though he is now Job, he was at one time the “arm of God,” and being both man and God is an impossibility. Dickey's earlier war poems always show him a survivor, grateful to survive, rather boyish and stunned by the mystery of a strange rightness beneath disorder; it seems to have taken him many years to get to this particular poem, though its meaning in his life must have been central. Now the survivor is also a killer. What of this, what of killing?—What is a release from the sin of killing? Confession, but, most of all, guilt; if the poet cannot make himself feel guilt even for the deaths of children, how will it be possible for him to feel anything human at all?—

… some technical-minded stranger with my hands
Is sitting in a glass treasure-hole of blue light,
Having potential fire under the undeodorized arms
Of his wings, on thin bomb-shackles,
The “tear-drop-shaped” 300-gallon drop-tanks
Filled with napalm and gasoline.

This stranger is, or was, Dickey himself, who flew one hundred combat missions through the South Pacific, the Philippines, and Okinawa and participated in B-29 raids over Japan; but he is only a memory now, an eerily aesthetic memory. He exists in the mind of a suburban husband and father, worrying about his weight and the half-paid-for pantry that is part of his homeowning and his present “treasure-hole”:

Where the lawn mower rests on its laurels
Where the diet exists
For my own good          where I try to drop
Twenty years. …

So many years after the event, what remains? He is now a civilian, a citizen, an American who understands himself in ironic, secret charge of all the necessary trivia of unaesthetic life—the purchasing of golf carts and tennis shoes, new automobiles, Christmas decorations—that he knows as the “glue inspired / By love of country,” the means by which the possibly atomistic or death-bound ego is held fast in its identity. Though the wonder remains, he is far from the moon-hypnotized, somnambulistic rhythms of the past; “The Firebombing” is what Dickey would call an “open poem,” one in which a certain compulsiveness in the presentation of the subject matter precludes or makes peripheral an aesthetic response,⁶ and the poet's own recollection of his action is mocked, if it must be assessed in stylized terms:

As I sail artistically over
The resort town followed by farms,
Singing and twisting
All the handles in heaven          kicking
The small cattle off their feet
In a red costly blast
Flinging jelly over the walls
As in a chemical war-
fare field demonstration.

Remembering this, he knows that “my hat should crawl on my head” and “the fat on my body should pale”—but one of the horrors of this bombing raid is that it has somehow destroyed a normal human response, as if the “arm of God” the pilot had assumed had also annihilated him. Having shown us so convincingly in his poetry how natural, how inevitable, is man's love for all things, Dickey now shows us what happens when man is forced to destroy, forced to step down into history and be an American (“and proud of it”). In so doing he enters a tragic dimension in which few poets indeed have operated. Could Whitman's affirmation hold out if he were forced to affirm not just the violence of others, but his own? If war is necessary, warriors are necessary; someone must sacrifice his cosmic love; and not only is the traditional life-praising song of the poet savagely mocked by his performance as a patriot in wartime, but the poet cannot even experience his own deeds, for he has acted as a machine inside a machine. In “The Firebombing” everything must remain remote and abstract, not experienced in any vital way. The Machine Age splits man irreparably from his instinctive need to see, to feel, to know through the senses. The Whitmanesque affirmation of man is difficult to sustain if the poet can see the objects of his love only from a great height, through an intellectual telescope. When Whitman feels he is “on the verge of a usual mistake” (“Song of Myself,” stanza 38), it is only an emotional mistake; he could never have considered the nihilism of a self without emotions, in which his inventiveness could really attach itself to nothing because it could experience nothing.

After this dreamlike unleashing of “all American fire,” the poet states flatly that death will not be what it should—a counterstatement, perhaps, to Schweitzer's reverence for life. This is the poet's unique vision:

                                                                      Ah, under one's dark arms
Something strange-scented falls—when those on earth
Die, there is not even sound;
One is cool and enthralled in the cockpit,
Turned blue by the power of beauty,
In a pale treasure-hole of soft light
Deep in aesthetic contemplation,
Seeing the ponds catch fire
And cast it through ring after ring
Of land. …
.....It is this detachment,
The honored aesthetic evil,
The greatest sense of power in one's life,
That must be shed in bars, or by whatever
Means, by starvation
Visions in well-stocked pantries. …

These “visions” will inspire in the poet wilder and wilder imaginings in his own creative life and an abandonment of the ego as “homeowner” in favor of the ego as “hunter” or “primitive.” The mechanized State tempts one to an aesthetic evil, and so perhaps salvation may be found in a pre-aesthetic, prehistorical animality that will seize upon possible rites (the structural basis of Deliverance) in order to exorcise the despairing and suicidal violence of the animal self. Whether Dickey's themes are explorative rather than absolute, whether his work traces an autobiographical query or a record, the function of his poetry seems to be the demonstration of the failure of such a vision. And yet it is certainly tempting to take on the viciousness—and the innocence—of the animal, to take for our totems owls, snakes, foxes, wolverines, and to reject forever the possibilities of detachment and evil that are inherent in civilization.

Like Dostoyevsky, Dickey considers the helplessness of the killer. But, unlike Dostoyevsky, he cannot imagine a transformation of the killer into a higher form of himself: the mysterious process by which Raskolnikov grows and by which Smerdyakov can be seen as a rudimentary form of Father Zossima. But Dickey cannot operate through metaphor, as Dostoyevsky did, for he was the man, he did these things, he and no one else. Though his poetry charts a process of wonders, a changing of selves, finally he is only himself, a particular man, trapped in a finite and aging body with memories that belong to him and not to the rest of us, not to any liberalized concept of the guilt we all “share.” (Like Marcuse, Dickey could probably feel no more than scorn for the “repressive tolerance” of some aspects of liberalism.) If made general and universal, in order to be shared, is guilt itself not made an aesthetic event?—a luxury?—a perversion?

But the narrator of the poem cannot concern himself with such abstractions:

All this, and I am still hungry,
Still twenty years overweight, still unable
To get down there or see
What really happened.
.....                                                                                          … It is that I can imagine
At the threshold nothing
With its ears crackling off
Like powdery leaves,
Nothing with children of ashes, nothing not
Amiable, gentle, well-meaning. …

A poetry of Being can move to perfect resolutions, but this poetry of anguished Becoming cannot. (“Some can, it is often said,” Dickey has remarked, ironically and sadly.) The narrative and confessional elements of “The Firebombing” demand a totally different aesthetic: the aesthetic-denying open form. No reconciliation of opposites is possible here because the poet cannot reconcile himself to his earlier self. And so what of “Absolution? Sentence?” These do not matter for “The thing itself is in that.”

“The Firebombing” is central to an understanding of Dickey's work. It could not have been prophesied on the basis of the earlier, Roethke-inspired poems; but once it appears, unsuppressed, it is so powerful an illumination that it helps to explain a great deal that might remain mysterious and puzzling. Buckdancer's Choice, Falling, and, above all, The Eye-Beaters deal with mortality, decay, disease, perhaps attributable in part to the poet's actual aging, but only in part, for the descent into a physically combative and increasingly unaesthetic world is not the usual pattern our finest poets follow, as both Roethke and Yeats, and other poets of the “Second Birth,” suggest. Yet the emphasis Dickey places upon mortality, his self-consciousness about it, is a motif that begins to appear even in his literary criticism. How is it possible that the man who believes in nature—in natural processes—should feel uneasy about the natural process of aging? It is a paradox in Hemingway also, but perhaps it is to be understood in Rilke's terms: our fear is not of death, but of life unlived. In an introduction to Paul Carroll's The Young American Poets (Chicago, 1968), Dickey makes a statement that totally contradicts the contemplative, balanced criticism of The Suspect in Poetry of only four years previous:

The aging process almost always brings to the poet the secret conviction that he has settled for far too little. … The nearer he gets to his end the more he yearns for the caves: for a wild, shaggy, all-out, all-involving way of speaking where language and he (or, now, someone: some new poet) engage each other at primitive levels, on ground where the issues are not those of literary fashion but are quite literally those of life and death. All his lifelong struggle with “craft” seems a tragic and ludicrous waste of time. …

(p. 7)

One would imagine, from such remarks, that the speaker is far older than forty-five; “the nearer he gets to his end …” is a visionary statement that might be comprehensible in the Yeats of Last Poems, but astonishing in a poet who is the same age as the Yeats of The Green Helmet. But if a denial of “craft” (or civilization) is needed in order to release spontaneous energy, then one can see why, for Dickey, it must be attempted.

ENTROPY

Buckdancer's Choice received the National Book Award in 1965, and in 1967 Dickey put together his Poems 1957-1967 for Wesleyan University Press. The Poems do not observe strict chronological order, however, beginning with the demonic “May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County, Georgia, by a Woman Preacher Leaving the Baptist Church,” one of Dickey's most flamboyant poems. Clearly, Dickey does not want the reader to enter the world of Into the Stone with the innocence he himself had entered it; that celebration of forms is all but outshouted by the eleven-page sermon, which is about violence done to and by a young girl in Georgia, and about her escape with her motorcycle-riding lover, “stoned out of their minds on the white / Lightning of fog”—

                                        singing          the saddlebags full of her clothes
Flying          snagging          shoes hurling away          stockings grabbed-off
Unwinding and furling on twigs: all we know          all we could follow
Them by was her underwear          was stocking after stocking where it tore
Away, and a long slip stretched on a thorn          all these few gave
Out. Children, you know it: that place was where they took
Off into the air          died          disappeared          entered my mouth your mind

It is an incredible achievement, with the intonations of a mad, inspired sermon, the flesh elevated beyond the spirit, but both elevated into myth. It is a myth that transforms everything into it: everything turns into everything else, through passion. The intellect exercises very little control in this “wild, shaggy, all-out, all-involving” work, and though Dickey has expressed doubt over the value of Allen Ginsberg's poetry,⁷ one is forced to think of certain works of Ginsberg's and of how, under ether sniffing or morphine injection, Ginsberg wrote all of Ankor Wat and that extravaganza “Aether,” in which a preaching voice proclaims certain truths to us: “we are the sweeping of the moon / we're what's left over from perfection”—“(my) Madness is intelligible reactions to / Unintelligible phenomena”—

And—

What can be possible
in a minor universe
in which you can see
God by sniffing the
gas in a cotton?

(“Aether,” in Reality Sandwiches)

Dickey is much more violent, more heartless than Ginsberg, of course, since he is driven by energies more archaic than is Ginsberg, who is a philosopher with a respect for the syntax of the imagination if not of superficial grammar; the “May Day Sermon” is at once revenge for and repetition of the helplessness of the bomber pilot, a mythic annihilation of a punishing, near-invisible father, and an escape off into space, the girl's clothing cast off behind her like the airline stewardess' clothing in “Falling.” In all the exuberant spurts of language there is violence, but especially here:

                    And she comes down          putting her back into
The hatchet          often          often          he is brought down          laid out
Lashing          smoking          sucking wind: Children, each year at this time
A girl will tend to take an ice pick in both hands          a long pine
Needle          will hover          hover: Children, each year at this time
Things happen quickly          and it is easy for a needle to pass
Through the eye of a man bound for Heaven          she leaves it naked goes
Without further sin through the house

After countless readings, “May Day Sermon” still has the power to shock: consider the “needle-eye-Heaven” joke. The maniacal repetitions make one wince (“get up … up in your socks and rise”), and the Dylan Thomas-surreal touches sometimes seem forced (“Dancing with God in a mule's eye”), but the poem's shrieking transmutation of murder, nakedness, eroticism, fertility, and poetry into a single event has an irresistible strength: “everything is more more More.” Nature itself becomes active in the process of transmutation as even “peanuts and beans exchange / Shells in joy,” and in a poetic sleight of hand reminiscent of Thomas's Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait at its apocalyptic conclusion, “the barn falls in / Like Jericho.” The countryside itself is speaking through the woman preacher “as beasts speak to themselves / Of holiness learned in the barn.” It is mysticism, but existential and ribald, noisy, filled with the humming of gnats and strange prophecies:

                              Each May you will crouch like a sawhorse to make yourself
More here          you will be cow chips          chicken croaking …
.....                                                                                                    and every last one of you will groan
Like nails barely holding          and your hair be full of the gray
Glints of stump chains.          Children, each year at this time you will have
Back-pain, but also heaven

In “May Day Sermon” Dickey creates a patchwork of images that go beyond the “not wholly sane” images of “Chenille.”

However, Buckdancer's Choice contains several very personal and moving poems dealing with mortality, the title poem and “Angina” (which deal with Dickey's mother, an invalid “dying of breathless angina”), “Them, Crying,” “The Escape,” and one that reasserts the mystical possibility of transcending death, its certainties expressed in a steady three-beat line:

All ages of mankind unite
Where it is dark enough.
.....All creatures tumbled together
Get back in their wildest arms
No single thing but each other. …

(“The Common Grave”)

But the most passionate poems are counterstatements concerned with developing images adequate to express horror; in “Pursuit from Under” the poet summons up a terrifying image that does not have its place in his own experience, or even in his probable experience, but is a conscious re-creation of a memory. He is standing in a meadow, in August, and imagines he hears the “bark of seals” and feels “the cold of a personal ice age. …” Then he recalls having once read an account of Arctic explorers who died of starvation and whose journal contained a single entry of unforgettable horror:

… under the ice,
The killer whale darts and distorts,
Cut down by the flawing glass
To a weasel's shadow,
And when, through his ceiling, he sees
Anything darker than snow
He falls away
To gather more and more force
                                                            … then charges
Straight up, looms up at the ice and smashes
Into it with his forehead. …

And so the killer whale pursues the poet, even in this familiar meadow in the South, and he thinks of “how the downed dead pursue us”—“not only in the snow / But in the family field.” It is interesting to note that Norman Mailer's nihilistic and very deliberately “literary” novel Why Are We in Vietnam? also transports its protagonist/victim to the Arctic in order to allow him a vision of God-as-beast; this “vision” is then imposed upon all of American (universal?) experience and can allow for no possibilities of transcendence. If God is a beast (as Dickey concludes in “The Eye-Beaters”), then the beast is God, and one must either acquiesce to Him and experience the helplessness of terror in an ordinary southern meadow, or imitate Him, taking on some of His powers. But, increasingly, the poet reaches out beyond his own geographical and historical territory to appropriate this vision. It demands a distortion or a rejection of naturalistic life; at times, as he admits, a kind of necessary theatricality, as he explains in Self-Interviews why hunting is so important to him: “… the main thing is to re-enter the cycle of the man who hunts for his food. Now this may be playacting at being a primitive man, but it's better than not having any rapport with the animal at all … I have a great sense of renewal when I am able to go into the woods and hunt with a bow and arrow, to enter into the animal's world in this way.” And, in Deliverance, the experience of “renewal” or deliverance itself is stimulated by a hunt for other men; simple animals are no longer enough, and the whole of the novel is constructed around those several intensely dramatic moments in which the narrator sights his target—a human and usually forbidden target—and kills him with an arrow from his powerful bow. The arrow is at least real; the napalm and gasoline bomb are not, since they are dropped upon abstractions. And, too, the necessary intimacy of the besieged men in Deliverance approximates a primitive brotherliness, excluding the confusion that women bring to a world of simple, clear, direct actions. For women, while mysterious and unfathomable, are also “civilization.”

But if women are objects, goddess objects, they too can be assimilated into the mystique of primitive power-worship. One of the most striking poems in all of Dickey's work is “The Fiend,” which magically transforms a voyeur/lover into a tree, into an omnipotent observer, back into a voyeur again, while throughout he is the poet who loves and desires and despairs of truly knowing his subject; the poem is a long, hushed, reverential overture to murder. Yet the equation of the voyeur with the poet is obvious, and the poem concludes ominously by remarking how “the light / Of a hundred favored windows” has “gone wrong somewhere in his glasses. …” Dickey is remarkably honest in acknowledging the value he puts upon his own fantasies, in contrast to the less interesting world of reality. What is important is his imaginative creation, his powers of seeing. In praise of what a Jungian would call the “anima,” Dickey has said in Sorties that “poor mortal perishable women are as dust before these powerful and sensual creatures of the depths of one's being” (p. 4). A dangerous overestimation of the individual's self-sufficiency, one might think, especially since there is always the possibility of that interior light going “wrong somewhere in his glasses.”

In fact, in Dickey's later poems eyesight becomes crucial, aligned with the mysterious grace of masculinity itself. When one's vision begins to weaken, there is an immediate danger of loss of control; conversely, “sight” itself can be rejected, denied, as a prelude to glorious savagery. Or the denial of vision can facilitate a more formal, sinister betrayal, as Dickey imagines himself as, simultaneously, a slave owner on a southern plantation and the white father of an illegitimate black son and the father-who-denies-his-son, a master driven to madness by his role as an owner, in the poem “Slave Quarters.” Dickey's question concerns itself with many forms of paternal betrayal, a betrayal of the eyes of others:

What it is to look once a day
Into an only
Son's brown, waiting, wholly possessed
Amazing eye, and not
Acknowledge, but own. …

How take on the guilt … ? is the poem's central question.

In the section Falling in Poems 1957-1967, Dickey explores further extensions of life, beginning with “Reincarnation (II),” in which the poet has taken on the form of a bird. His first reincarnation was into a snake, which we leave waiting in an old wheel not for food but for the first man to walk by—minute by minute the head of the snake becoming “more poisonous and poised.” But as a bird the poet undergoes a long, eerie, metaphysical flight that takes him out of mortality altogether—

                                                                                          to be dead
In one life is to enter
Another          to break out          to rise above          the clouds

But “Reincarnation (II)” is extremely abstract and does not seem to have engaged the poet's imaginative energies as deeply as “Reincarnation (I)” of Buckdancer's Choice. It is balanced by the long “Falling,” an astonishing poetic feat that dramatizes the accidental fall of an airline stewardess from a plane to her death in a corn field. “The greatest thing that ever came to Kansas” undergoes a number of swift metamorphoses—owl, hawk, goddess—stripping herself naked as she falls. She imagines the possibility of falling into water, turning her fall into a dive so that she can “come out healthily dripping / And be handed a Coca-Cola,” but ultimately she is helpless to save herself; she is a human being, not a bird like the spiritual power of “Reincarnation (II),” and she comes to know how “the body will assume without effort any position / Except the one that will sustain it enable it to rise live / Not die.” She dies, “driven well into the image of her body,” inexplicable and unquestionable, and her clothes begin to come down all over Kansas; a kind of mortal goddess, given as much immortality by this strange poem as poetry is capable of giving its subjects.

The starkly confessional poem “Adultery” tells of the poet's need for life-affirming moments, though they are furtive and evidently depend upon a belief that the guilt caused by an act of adultery is magical—“We have done it again we are / Still living.” The poem's subject is really not adultery or any exploration of the connections between people; it is about the desperate need to prove that life is still possible. We are still living: that guilty, triumphant cry. In this poem and several others, Dickey seems to share Norman Mailer's sentiment that sex would be meaningless if divorced from “guilt.” What role does the woman play in this male scenario? She is evidently real enough, since she is driven to tears by the impossibility of the adulterous situation; but in a more important sense she does not really exist, for she is one of those “poor mortal perishable women” temporarily illuminated by the man's anima-projection, and she is “as dust” compared to the fantasy that arises from the depths of the lover's being. Descartes' I doubt, hence I think; I think, hence I am has become, for those who despair of the Cartesian logic of salvation, I love, hence I exist; I am loved, hence I must exist. …

With Dickey this fear is closely related to the fundamental helplessness he feels as a man trapped in a puzzling technological civilization he cannot totally comprehend. Even the passionate love of women and the guilt of adultery will not be sufficient, ultimately, to convince the poet that he will continue to exist. He identifies with the wolverine, that “small, filthy, unwinged” creature whose species is in danger of extinction, in the poem “For the Last Wolverine.” The wolverine is an animal capable of “mindless rage,” enslaved by the “glutton's internal fire,” but Dickey recognizes a kinship with it in the creature's hopeless desire to “eat / The world. …”

Yet, for all its bloodthirsty frenzy, the wolverine is in danger of dying out. It is a “nonsurvivor” after all. The poet's mystical identification with this beast is, paradoxically, an identification with death, and death driven, indeed, is the impulse behind his musing: “How much the timid poem needs / The mindless explosion of your rage. …” Like Sylvia Plath and innumerable others, the poet imagines a division between himself as a human being and the rest of the world—the universe itself—symbolized by the fact that his consciousness allows him to see and to judge his position, while the rest of nature is more or less mute. It is doubtful, incidentally, that nature is really so mute, so unintelligent, as alienated personalities seem to think; it is certainly doubtful that the human ego, the “I,” is in any significant way isolated from the vast, living totality of which it is a part. However, granted for the moment that the poet is “timid” when he compares himself to the most vicious of animals, it is still questionable whether such viciousness, such “mindless explosion” of rage, is superior to the poem, to the human activity of creating and organizing language in a coherent, original structure. The prayer of the poem is very moving, but it is not the wolverine's consciousness that is speaking to us: “Lord, let me die but not die / Out.”

Dickey has dramatized from the inside the terrors of the personality that fears it may not be immortal after all; its control of itself and of other people and of the environment seems to be more and more illusory, fading, failing. “Entropy”—a much-used and misused term—refers to the phenomenon of energy loss and increasing disorder as a system begins to falter, and is always a threat, a terror, to those who assume that the system to which they belong or which they have themselves organized was meant to be infinite. There is no space here to consider the psychological reasons for the shift from man's assumption of immortality as an abstraction (the “immortal” soul was expected to survive, but not the “mortal” man—the personality or ego) to his frantic and futile hope for immortality in the flesh. There are cultural, political, economic reasons, certainly, but they cannot entirely account for the naïveté of the wish: I want to live forever. Because this wish is so extraordinarily naïve, even childish, it is never allowed in that form into the consciousness of most intelligent people. When it emerges, it is always disguised. It sometimes takes the form of a vague, disappointed despair; or rage without any appropriate object; or a hopeless and even sentimental envy of those human beings (or animals) who strike the despairing one as too stupid to know how unhappy they should be. The excessive admiration of animals and birds and other manifestations of “unconscious” nature is, in some people, a screen for their own self-loathing. They are in “hell” because the activity of their consciousness is mainly self-concerned, self-questioning, self-doubting. The rest of the world, however, seems quite content. As entropy is irrationally feared by some, it is as irrationally welcomed by others. Disorganization—chaos—the “mindless explosion” of repressed rage: all are welcomed, mistaken for a liberating of the deepest soul.

MYSTICISM: EVOLUTION, DISSOLUTION

Mysticism is generally considered in the light of its highest religious and spiritual achievements. Most literature on the subject deals exclusively with saintly human beings, some of whom have experienced not only a powerful emotional enlightenment but an intellectual enlightenment as well. These mystics are the ones who have, in a sense, created our world: it is unnecessary to mention their names, since in a way those of us who live now have always lived, unconsciously, involuntarily, within the scope of their imaginations—as a writer lives, when he is writing, within the vast but finite universe of his language. There is an existence beyond that, surely; but he cannot quite imagine it. That I exist at this moment—that I am a writer, a woman, a surviving human being—has very little to do with accident, but is a direct, though remote, consequence of someone's thinking: Let us value life. Let us enhance life. Let us imagine a New World, a democracy. … It is not true, as Auden so famously stated, that poetry makes nothing happen. On the contrary, poetry, or the poetic imagination, has made everything happen.

Yet “mysticism” can swing in other directions. Essentially, it is a loss of “ego,” but it may result in a loss of “ego control” as well. A mysterious, unfathomable revolution seems to be taking place in our civilization, and like all upheavals in history it is neither knowable nor governable; like inexplicable branchings in the flow of life, in evolution, it goes its way quite apart from the wishes of entire species, let alone individuals. However, it seems to be characterized by loss of ego, by experiences of transcendence among more and more people, especially younger people. Yet one brings to that other world of mysticism only the equipment, the conscious moral intelligence, that one has developed through the activities of the ego: the experience of oneness with the divine, the knowledge of That Art Thou, gives us in its benevolent expression Jesus Christ, Gautama Buddha, and other founders of great religions, and in its malignant and grotesque expression a Hitler, a Stalin, a Charles Manson. The most important study of this subject still remains William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, since it was written by a man who did experience a sense of his ego's dissolution but who had not a ready-made religious structure into which he might leap. The mystic breaks free of human codes of morality, of all restraints, of “civilization,” of normality itself. Useless to argue with him, for he knows. When D. H. Lawrence declares that he is allied with the sun and not with men, he is speaking out of the certainty of his religious knowledge that he is a form of energy and derives his finite being only from a higher, external form of energy. Literary critics may concern themselves with metaphors, symbols, and allusion, but most writers are writing out of their deepest experience; the playful organization of words into structures, the aesthetic impulse, is always a secondary activity. And so is social action. And so is that social being, the “ego.”

But when the conscious ego has despaired of discovering values in the social world or in the world of spirit, the dissolution of that ego will probably not result in a higher wisdom, in an elevation of the moral sense so passionately required for survival. Instead, the mystic may plunge into his own ancestral past, into his own “animal” nature. This is especially tempting in an era characterized by superficiality, bad thinking, and outright inhumanity, for these abnormalities are considered “normal” and therefore “human.” Something must be valued—some god must be worshiped. Where is he? Where is it? Who has experienced him?

So it is not surprising that many people value the “animal” over the “human,” as if animals were not extraordinarily intelligent in their own contexts. In any case animals are not valued for what they are, but for their evidently uncivilized qualities; perhaps even for their cunning and savagery, their “innocence.” Should it be argued that animals live and die within strict codes of behavior (which in our species is “morality”), the romantic will not listen; he is certain that his animals are free, wild, even immortal in their own way. They always do all the things he has wished to do, but has not dared. They are not so obviously and embarrassingly his own creation as a cartoonist's animals are his, but they share, often with the female sex, that special numinous grace of being the image bearers of men. If it is a question of mere survival, the ideal will be a predator who cannot not survive, because he demands so little of his environment. Ted Hughes's Crow poems, for instance, are concerned with a minimal consciousness that is always human, though reduced to beak and claws and uncanny keenness of vision. But the poems are, upon examination, oddly abstract, even rhetorical and argumentative; they have very little of the slashing emotional immediacy of Dickey's best poems. What to Ted Hughes is an allegorical possibility is for Dickey an existential fact.

As the poet wakes from his dream of “stone,” enters the turbulent contests of “flesh,” he will no longer be able, even, to “sail artistically over” the wars of his civilization. He must participate in them as a man; if they will not come to him, he must seek them out.

The horror of Dickey's novel Deliverance grows out of its ordinary, suburban framework, the assimilation of brutal events by ordinary men; not near-Biblical figures like Crow, or men trapped in a distant and hostile world, but four middle-aged, middle-class men who want to canoe along a dangerous but attractive river not far from their homes. The novel is about our deep, instinctive needs to get back to nature, to establish some kind of rapport with primitive energies, but it is also about the need of some men to do violence, to be delivered out of their banal lives by a violence so irreparable that it can never be confessed. It is a fantasy of a highly civilized and affluent society, which imagines physical violence to be transforming in a mystical—and therefore permanent—sense, a society in which rites of initiation no longer exist. This society asks its men: How do you know you are men? But there is no answer except in terms of an earlier society, where the male is distinguished from the female, so far as behavior is concerned, by his physical strength and his willingnes to risk life. But killing other men can be made into a ritual, a proof of one's manhood; Deliverance is about this ritual. It is like Mailer's short novel Why Are We in Vietnam? in its consideration of homosexuality, though for Mailer homosexuality evokes terror and for Dickey it evokes loathing. The boys in the Mailer novel tremble on the verge of becoming lovers in their Arctic camp, but they draw back from each other, terrified, and are then given tremendous energies as “killer brothers” now united to go fight the war in Vietnam. Both novels demonstrate not any extraordinary fear of homosexuality but, what is more disturbing, a fear of affection. Dickey has so created his backwoods degenerates as to be beyond all human sympathy, so that most readers are compelled to become “killers” along with the narrator. The murder of the homosexual threat, whether an exterior force or an inner impulse, results in an apparent increase in animal spirits and appetite, and the narrator is able to return to civilization and to his wife, a man with a profound secret, in touch with an illicit, demonic mystery, delivered. Violence has been his salvation—his deliverance from ordinary life.

The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy is as crammed and various as its title suggests. A few poems are bluntly confessional, the “Apollo” poem is linked to a historic event, and all are in the same tone of musing, sometimes cynical, sometimes tender contemplation. The volume ends with “Turning Away: Variations on Estrangement,” a complex, abstract work of philosophical inquiry; but most of its poems are linked firmly to domestic things, and even the difficult subjects of disease and death are made “livable,” in Dickey's words.

The book is disturbing because it asks so many questions but refuses to answer them. It is filled with questions: What did I say? Or do? Am I still drunk? Who is this woman? Where? Can you see me? Can the five fingers / Of the hand still show against / anything? Have they come for us? It is also disturbing because of its attitude toward certain subjects: men suffering from diabetes and cancer are not treated solemnly, and in Dickey's fantasy of dying from a heart attack (or love) he and the nurse/prostitute flicker downward together “Like television like Arthur Godfrey's face / Coming on huge happy.” The book's seventeen poems are of widely varying length and seem to make up a dialogue or combat among their various themes, as if the poet were entering into a battle with aspects of his soul—the word “battle” used deliberately here, because Dickey declares in “Turning Away” how it is necessary to turn “From an old peaceful love / To a helmet of silent war / Against the universe.”

Many of the poems are about diseased emotions or diseased forms of hope, such as the futility of seeking out one's youth by “going home” decades later; but several deal with specific disorders—“Diabetes,” “The Cancer Match,” “Madness,” and “The Eye-Beaters” (which is about both blindness and insanity). “Diabetes” is a brutally frank, sardonic confessional poem in two parts which begins with the poet's gigantic thirst: “One night I thirsted like a prince / Then like a king / Then like an empire like a world / On fire.” But the thirst is not a thirst for life, it is not a metaphor; it is clinically real. After the illness is diagnosed, the poet sees sugar as “gangrene in white,” and his routine of exercise is attended by an ironic counting, a parody of his earlier poetic themes:

Each time the barbell
Rose each time a foot fell
Jogging, it counted itself
One death two death three death and resurrection
For a little while. Not bad! …

He will endure a “livable death,” scaled down and presided over by a nice young physician. The second half of the poem, “Under Buzzards,” has Dickey imagining in heavy summer the “birds of death” attracted by the “rotten, nervous sweetness” of his blood, the “city sugar” of his life. In a final, defiant gesture, the poet deliberately summons the birds of death, but he does it in a curiously unheroic way, by taking a forbidden drink of beer:

                    Red sugar of my eyeballs
Feels them [the buzzards] turn blindly
                    In the fire rising turning turning
                                        Back to Hogback Ridge, and it is all
Delicious, brother: my body is turning is flashing unbalanced
          Sweetness everywhere, and I am calling my birds.

Characteristic of this volume is a repeated use of terms to link the reader with the poet: “my friend,” “brother,” “companion,” “my son,” “you.” The whole of “Venom” is a kind of prayer, the poet and his listener joined as brothers who must “turn the poison / Round,” back on itself, the venom that comes “from the head” of man and corrupts his life blood. “Madness” is about a domestic dog that contracts rabies and must be killed, but it is also a call for “Help help madness help.”

Balancing the poems of disease are several about Dickey's sons and the Life-commissioned double poem, “Apollo,” placed near the physical center of the magazine and divided by a black page—a symbol of the black featureless depths of space in which our planet, “the blue planet steeped in its dream,” has a minute existence. The poems to or about Dickey's sons are all excellent, though there is an air of sorrow about them. “The Lord in the Air” is prefaced by a quotation from Blake: “… If the spectator could … make a friend & companion of one of these Images of wonder … then would he meet the Lord in the air & … be happy.” Dickey seems to be reimagining an earlier role of his own as he describes a son's performance with a crow whistle, so deceiving the crows that they come to him from miles away, “meeting the Lord / Of their stolen voice in the air.” The crows have but one word, a syllable that means everything to them, and in gaining control of it the boy becomes a kind of poet. A “new / Power over birds and beasts” has been achieved by man, but “not for betrayal, or to call / Up death or desire, but only to give” a unique tone “never struck in the egg.” O Chris come in, drop off now is the language Dickey allots to himself; magic has become the property of his boy.

“Messages” deals with images of life (butterflies with “ragged, brave wings”)—and death (a cow's skeleton), and matches the father's protectiveness with his wisdom, which his sleeping son cannot yet be told: that life is a gamble, a play “in bones and in wings and in light.” The poem is also about the necessity of a father's surrendering his son to life—“to the sea”—with the reminder that human love exists in its own world, unchallenged by the nihilistic depths of the ocean or the speechless primitive world. The love evident in the “message” poems is totally lacking in the disease poems, as if the speakers were angrily fighting self-pity; “The Cancer Match” imagines cancer and whiskey fighting together, in the drunken mind of a dying man who has “cancer and whiskey / In a lovely relation”: “I watch them struggle / All around the room, inside and out / Of the house, as they battle / Near the mailbox. …” No dignity here, even in dying; the poem refuses to mourn the body's decay.

Addressing himself to the Apollo moon shot, Dickey synthesizes the diverse emotions of awe, suspicion, cynicism, and acquiescence; like Mailer in Of a Fire on the Moon, he cannot help but wonder if some catastrophe will be unleashed (“Will the moonplague kill our children … ?”), and just as Mailer contemplated photographs of the moon's surface and thought of Cézanne, Dickey, in the imagined consciousness of one of the moon explorers, hears lines from Gray's Elegy “helplessly coming / From my heart. …” A triumph of technology is seen in terms of aesthetic triumphs of the past. Both men express doubt about the future, but both accept its inevitable direction, though Dickey is characteristically more emotionally involved:

                                                            My eyes blind
                    With unreachable tears          my breath goes all over
                                                                                          Me and cannot escape. …
                    Our clothes embrace we cannot touch we cannot
                                                                                          Kneel. We stare into the moon
dust, the earth-blazing ground. We laugh, with the beautiful craze
                                        Of static. We bend, we pick up stones.

The future is explorable, however, only through one's imaginative identification with other men. The most powerful poems in The Eye-Beaters are those that refuse to deal with the future at all and explore old obsessions with the past. The pathetic double poem “Going Home” takes the poet (“the Keeper”) back to his own lost childhood, where he encounters his Old Self like a “younger brother, like a son,” in a confusion of homes, times, places, rooms that live “only / In my head.” His childhood is distant from the adulthood he now inhabits, in which he is a Keeper of rooms “growing intolerable,” through which he walks like a stranger, “as though I belonged there.” The riddle of Identities! Identities! the younger Dickey puzzled over (in the poem “Mangham” of Buckdancer's Choice) still taunts him, as past and present contend, and the Keeper fears he will go mad with his questions:

                              And tell me for the Lord God
's sake, where are all our old
Dogs?
                    Home?
                                        Which way is that?
Is it this vacant lot? …

In a final admission of defeat, the “mad, weeping Keeper” realizes that he cannot keep anything alive: none of his rooms, his people, his past, his youth, himself. Yet he cannot let them die either, and he will call them “for a little while, sons.” In “Looking for the Buckhead Boys,” a poem on the verge of turning into a short story, the futile search for one's youth in the past is given a specific location, and the poet returns to his home town to look for his old friends; if he can find one of them, just one, he believes his youth will once again “walk / Inside me like a king.” But his friends are gone, or changed, or paralyzed or, like Charlie Gates at the filling station, not really the person for whom the poet has a secret “that has to be put in code.” The poem ends with a flat anticlimatic imperative: “Fill 'er up, Charlie.” Encountering one's past, in the form of an old friend, underscores the impossibility of “keeping” the past.

“The Eye-Beaters” is an extravagant, curious fantasy, supposedly set in a home for children in Indiana. In this home some children have gone blind, evidently since admission; not just blind, but mad, so that their arms must be tied at their sides to prevent their beating their eyeballs in order to stimulate the optic nerves. By no naturalistic set of facts can one determine how this “home” can be real, and so the reader concludes that the entire poem is an explorative fantasy, like “The Owl King,” which dealt with a child's blindness. The blindness of the children and their pathetic response to it is so distressing that the Visitor must create a fiction in order to save himself from madness. He tries to imagine what they see:

                                                                                          Lord, when they slug
Their blue cheeks blacker, can it be that they do not see the wings
And green of insects          or the therapist suffering kindly          but
                                                                                          a tribal light old
Enough to be seen without sight?

The vision he imagines for them is prehistoric; a caveman artist, “Bestial, working like God,” is drawing beasts on a cave wall: deer, antelope, elk, ibex, quagga, rhinoceros of wool-gathering smoke, cave bear, mammoth, “beings that appear / Only in the memory of caves.” The niches of the children's middle brain, “where the race is young,” are filled not with images of the Virgin but with squat shapes of the Mother or with the bloody hand print on the stone “where God gropes like a man” and where the artist “hunts and slashes” his wounded game. Then the Visitor's rational, skeptical nature argues with him, addressing him as “Stranger”; perhaps the children want to smash their eyes in order to see nothing, and the Visitor's invention of the cave-man artist is an expression of his own blindness, his hope for magic that might “re-invent the vision of the race.” He admits his desire to believe that the world calls out for art, for the magical life-renewal of art, and not for the blankness of nothing save physical pain. Otherwise it is possible that he will go mad. Otherwise what can he value in his own poetry? The artist must be a therapist to the race, and not simply to himself; but Dickey concludes this complex poem by acquiescing to his own self-defined “fiction,” a kind of lie that enables him to identify himself with the cave-man artist and to escape the deadening truths of his Reason by choosing “madness, / Perversity.” He projects himself back into a dim racial memory, a hideous vision that excludes history. No salvation, except by way of a total surrender to the irrational and uninventive:

                                                                                          Beast, get in
My way. Your body opens onto the plain. Deer, take me into your life-
lined form. I merge, I pass beyond in secret          in perversity and the sheer
Despair of invention          my double-clear bifocals off my reason gone
Like eyes. Therapist, farewell at the living end. Give me my spear.

The prayer, addressed to a “Beast,” necessarily involves the poet in a transformation downward, into a kind of human beast whose “despair of invention” forces him to inarticulate, violent action. It is possible that the conclusion is an ambiguous one—the artist denying his art through a self-conscious work of art—or, as Raymond Smith has seen it, in an essay called “The Poetic Faith of James Dickey,”⁸ the poet rejecting any art-for-art's-sake aesthetic. However, the final words of the poem seem the expression of a suicidal loss of faith in anything but action, and that action primitive and bloody.

Dickey had diagnosed this action as “Perversity,” and the poem has a passionate, religious feel about it, the testament of a loss of faith in one religion (Art) and the tentative commitment to another (the “Beast”). This is the mystical leap that Dickey's imagination has yearned for, the defiance of his higher, artistic, moral self, experienced in middle age as a banality from which he must—somehow—be delivered.

The forms of Dickey's “heroism” are anachronistic, perhaps, but his despair may be prophetic.

In these later poems, the poems of “flesh,” there is a dramatic ferocity that goes beyond even the shimmering walls of words he created for “Falling” and “May Day Sermon.” Dickey is there, inside the poem; reading it, we are inside his head. He is willing to tell everything, anything; he is willing to become transparent, in war now against his own exquisite sensibility. Help help madness help: the book's shameless cry.

Society did not always shy away from the self-expression of its most sensitive and eccentric members. Much has been written about the relationship of so-called primitive people with their priests and shamans: these societies benefited from their leaders' ecstasies and bizarre revelations and did not destroy them as heretics or castrate them by interpreting their visions as “only poetry.” What value can the visionary give to his own experience if, returning to the world with it, he is at the very most congratulated for having invented some fascinating, original metaphors? Dickey, so disturbing to many of us, must be seen in a larger context, as a kind of “shaman,” a man necessarily at war with his civilization because that civilization will not, cannot, understand what he is saying. Mircea Eliade defines the shaman as a “specialist in ecstasy”: traditionally, he excites himself into a frenzy, enters a trancelike state, and receives the power of understanding and imitating the language of birds and animals. He is not a “normal” personality, at least in these times. He participates in what is believed to be divine.

If the shaman, or the man with similar magical powers, has no social structure in which to interpret himself, and if he is obviously not normal in the restrictive sense of that word, his instincts will lead him into a rebellion against that world; at his most serene, he can manage a cynical compromise with it. Irony can be a genteel form of savagery, no less savage than physical brutality. In some intellectuals, irony is the expression of disappointed hopes; in others, it is a substitute for violence. It is violent. If the release offered by words no longer satisfies the intense need of the sufferer, he will certainly fall into despair, estrangement. Hence a preoccupation, in Dickey, with physical risk, a courting of the primitive in art and in life (in carefully restricted areas, of course), and a frantic, even masochistic need to continually test and “prove” himself.⁹ The ritual of hunting cannot ultimately work, because it is so obviously a “ritual”—a game—and bears no relationship at all to what hunting was, and is, to people who must hunt for their food. It is just another organized adventure, another “timid poem.” Consciousness is split on a number of levels: the sensual keenness inspired by adultery and guilt, the excitement inspired by near death, the mindless rage of the beast who fears extinction, the plight of the overweight suburban homeowner, the husband, the father, the poet … and yet the truest self seems somehow detached, uninvolved. “Turning Away,” the last poem in The Eye-Beaters, deals with aspects of estrangement not simply in terms of marriage but in terms of the self, which hopes to see “Later, much later on” how it may make sense—perhaps as a fictional creation, in a book.

If regression cannot be justified by calling it “ritual”—hunting, fighting, excessively brutal sports—it must be abandoned. If the poet can no longer evoke the “primitive,” since his body cannot keep pace with the demands of his imagination, the primitive ideal must be abandoned. Physical prowess—extraordinary keenness of eyesight—can be undermined by that baffling human problem, mortality and disease. Death awaits. Yet one is not always prepared for it. If it is seen as an embarrassment, another obscure defeat, it will never be accepted at all; better to pray for the Apocalypse, so that everyone can die at once, with no one left to think about it afterward. The stasis celebrated in much of contemporary literature, the erecting of gigantic paranoid-delusion systems that are self-enclosed and self-destructing, argues for a simple failure of reasoning: the human ego has too long imagined itself the supreme form of consciousness in the universe. When that delusion is taken from it, it suffers. Suffering, it projects its emotions outward onto everything, everyone, into the universe itself. Our imaginative literature has largely refused to integrate ever-increasing subtleties of intuitive experience with those of intellectual experience; it will not acknowledge the fact that the dynamism of our species has become largely a dynamism of the brain, not the body. Old loves die slowly. But they die.

The concluding poem in The Eye-Beaters differs from the rest in many ways. It is primarily a meditation. It is almost entirely speculative, an abstract seventeen-stanza work dealing with the mystery of the soul. The familiar theme of battle and certain specific images involved (helmets, meadows of “intensified grass”) are used in a way new to Dickey; its tone of hard, impassive detachment contrasts with the despairing ferocity of “The Eye-Beaters” and the poems of disease.

The immediate occasion for the poem is evidently dissatisfaction with an “old peaceful love.” Another person, nearby, is “suddenly / Also free … weeping her body away.” But the confessional quality of the poem is not very important; the poet's detachment approaches that of Eliot's in “Four Quarters.” Dickey could very well be writing about himself—his relationship with his “soul” (which in mystical literature is usually identified with the feminine, though that interpretation is probably not necessary). The poet's problem is how, as a “normal” man, to relate his predicament with the human condition generally. As in “Reincarnation (II),” the poet discovers himself released from one life and projected into another where he feels himself “Like a king starting out on a journey / Away from all things that he knows.” Outside the “simple-minded window” is a world of ordinary sights from which one may take his face; yet this world is one of danger and “iron-masked silence.” In utter stillness the poet stands with his palm on the window sill (as he once stood with his palm on the fence wire) and feels the “secret passivity” and “unquestionable Silence” of existence: man wears the reason for his own existence as he stands and, in such a confrontation, the “tongue grows solid also.”

Imagined then as a kind of Caesar (Dickey would like to “see with / the eyes of a very great general,” here as elsewhere), he realizes he has nothing to do in his own life with his military yearnings and his hope for himself to be utterly free of any finite time or place, an omni-potent life force released from identity to “breed / With the farthest women / And the farthest also in time: breed / Through bees, like flowers and bushes: / Breed Greeks, Egyptians and Romans hoplites / Peasants caged kings clairvoyant bastards. …” His desire is so vast as to exclude the personal entirely; he must turn away, at least in imagination, from the domesticity of his life, so that his soul can achieve the release it demands. It is nothing less than the wide universe that is the object of its desire; like the wolverine, the poet's soul hungers to “eat the world.” This desire is in itself a kind of miracle or reincarnation:

                                                  Turning away, seeing fearful
                    Ordinary ground, boys' eyes manlike go,
The middle-aged man's like a desperate
Boy's, the old man's like a new angel's. …

Dreaming, the poet sees horses, a “cloud / That is their oversoul,” and armed men who may spring from his teeth. He must speak of battles that do not stain the meadow with blood but release “inner lives”—as if through a pure concentration of will, of artistic creation, the poet realizes:

                              So many things stand wide
                    Open!          Distance is helplessly deep
                    On all sides          and you can enter, alone,
                                        Anything          anything can go
On wherever it wishes          anywhere in the world or in time
                                                            But here and now.

What must be resisted is the “alien sobbing” nearby; the poet's attachment to a finite self, a domestic existence, must be overcome, as if he were a guard on his duty to prevent the desertion of the higher yearnings of his soul. The most abstract charge of all is his sense that he might be, even, a hero in a book—his life might be “a thing / That can be learned, / As those earnest young heroes learned theirs, / Later, much later on.”

“Turning Away” is a tentative reply to the despairing vision of “The Eye-Beaters,” and it concludes a collection of widely varying poems with a statement about the need to transcend the physical life by an identification with the timeless, “physical life” having been examined frankly and unsparingly and found to be generally diseased. The poem's immediate occasion is marital discord, but Dickey's imagery of battle is a very generalized one—“So many battles / Fought in cow pastures fought back / And forth over anybody's farm / With men or only / With wounded eyes—” Dickey's most inclusive metaphor for life is life-as-battle; for man, man-as-combatant.

The emphasis Dickey places in his later poems upon decay, disease, regression, and estrangement suggests that they may constitute a terminal group of poems: terminal in the sense that the poet may be about to take on newer challenges. Having developed from the mysticism of Stone into and through the mysticism of Flesh, having explored variations on unity and variations on dissolution, he seems suspended—between the formal abstractions of “Turning Away” and the jagged primitive-heroic music of “The Eye-Beaters,” perhaps still seeking what Blake calls the “Image of wonder” that allows man to “meet the Lord in the Air & … be happy.”

In any case, Dickey's work is significant in its expression of the savagery that always threatens to become an ideal, when faith in human values is difficult to come by—or when a culture cannot accommodate man's most basic instincts, forcing them backward, downward, away from the conscious imagination and back into the body as if into the body of an ancient ancestor: into the past, that is, forbidding intelligent entry into the future.

Notes

1. The Suspect in Poetry (Madison, Minnesota: The Sixties Press, 1964), p. 47.

2. Lewis Thomas, M.D., “Information,” in the New England Journal of Medicine, December 14, 1972, pp. 1238-39.

3. Dickey either literally or figuratively puts on masks in any number of poems—notably “Armor,” “Drinking from a Helmet,” and “Approaching Prayer” (in which he puts on a “hollow hog's head”).

4. Dickey's perfect vision singled him out for training in night fighters in the Army Air Corps. Throughout his poetry there is a concern, not just imagistic or metaphorical, with vision—eyesight—that makes doubly poignant his conclusion in “False Youth: Two Seasons” (from Falling) that his youth was “a lifetime search / For the Blind.” Also, the conclusion of “The Eye-Beaters” shows us the poet “in perversity and the sheer / Despair of invention” taking his “Double-clear bifocals off”—then succumbing to a fantasy of regressive madness.

5. The Suspect in Poetry, p. 77. The word “helplessness” is repeated several times in connection with Jarrell, and in an essay on Howard Nemerov (a review of Nemerov's Selected Poems, 1960), Dickey praises Nemerov for what seem to me the wrong reasons: “… the enveloping emotion that arises from his writing is helplessness: the helplessness we all feel in the face of the events of our time, and of life itself: the helplessness one feels as one's legitimate but chronically unfair portion of all the things that can't be assuaged or explained” (p. 67). Throughout Self-Interviews, which seems the work of a different James Dickey, one who cannot do justice to the excellence of the essential Dickey, there is a reliance upon an inner, moral helplessness, as if certain emotional prejudices were there, in human nature, and one might as well acquiesce to them; though elsewhere does Dickey take on as rigorously combative a tone as Nietzsche in feeling that the true artist would not tolerate the world as it is even for one instant.

6. From Dickey's account of his growth as a poet, in Poets on Poetry, edited by Howard Nemerov (New York, 1966), pp. 225-38. It is ironic that Dickey should so distrust and mock his own reflective, intellectual nature, since he knows himself a poet of the “Second Birth”—one who has worked hard at his craft. Yet his finest poems give the impression of having been written very quickly; one feels the strange compulsion to read them quickly, as if to keep pace with the language. Dickey's poems are structures that barely contain the energies they deal with. That “agent” in the poem known as the “I” is unpredictable, at times frightening, for he may lead us anywhere. Dickey might have written extraordinary short stories had he not chosen to develop himself as a poet almost exclusively. In an excellent essay, “The Self as Agent,” from Sorties, Dickey says that the chief glory and excitement of writing poetry is the chance it gives the poet to “confront and dramatize parts of himself that otherwise would not have surfaced. The poem is a window opening not on truth but on possibility …” (p. 161).

7. Dickey's reviews of Howl and Kaddish are both negative. He says that Ginsberg's principal state of mind is “hallucination” and that the poetry is really “strewn, mishmash prose.” Yet Dickey allows that, somewhere, in the Babel of undisciplined contemporary poets, “there might one day appear a writer to supply the in-touch-with-living authenticity which current American poetry so badly needs, grown as it has genteel and almost suffocatingly proper.” From The Suspect in Poetry, pp. 16-19. When a poet-critic speaks in these terms, one may always assume he is talking about himself, whether he knows it or not.

8. Raymond Smith, “The Poetic Faith of James Dickey,” Modern Poetry Studies, Vol. 2, No. 6, pp. 259-72. Masculine response to Dickey's poetry probably differs inevitably from a woman's response.

9. Dickey has granted a number of interviews, all of them characterized by an extraordinary frankness. In a recent one, the poet William Heyen asks him to discuss the violent “morality” of Deliverance, and Dickey states that there is a kind of “absolutism” about country people in his part of the world: “Life and death … are very basic gut-type things, and if somebody does something that violates your code, you kill him, and you don't think twice about it. … the foremost fear of our time, especially with the growing crime rate, crime in the cities and so on, … the thing that we're most terrified of is being set upon by malicious strangers. …” He therefore agrees with the decisions his characters make in the novel, and it is clear from his discussion of Ed Gentry's decision to kill and Gentry's growing realization that he is a “born killer” (Dickey's words) that the novel, like much of the poetry, is an attempt to deal with an essentially mystical experience. That it is also brutal and dehumanizing is not Dickey's concern. Murder is “a quietly transfiguring influence” on the novel's hero. “A Conversation with James Dickey,” ed. by William Heyen, The Southern Review (Winter, 1973) IX, 1, pp. 135-56.