[In the following review, Mills explores Dickey's almost mystical poetic process and his characteristic themes—including the spiritual interpenetration of the living and the dead—but criticizes his lack of imagination in works like “The Firebombing,” and observes a diminishing intensity in his later poems.]

As various poets and critics have been remarking over the past few years, both the mood and the means of much of the important new American poetry has been noticeably changing. While it is difficult in the midst of such movement to predict with anything like accuracy the final course of contemporary poetry's drift and flow, there are certain characteristics which have become rather evident. In a recent essay, “Dead Horses and Live Issues,” (The Nation, April 24, 1967), the poet Louis Simpson discusses some of them and also indicates the kind of poetry which is currently being rejected. “There is,” he says, “an accelerating movement away from rationalistic verse toward poetry that releases the unconscious, the irrational, or, if your mind runs that way, magic. Surrealism was buried by the critics of the thirties and forties as somehow irrelevant; today it is one of the most commonly used techniques of verse.” Simpson goes on to specify some of the likely influences to come into play under these circumstances and the dangers of particular sorts of Surrealism, especially the dogmatic irrationalism of André Breton. Then he adds, affirmatively: “Contrary to Breton, poetry represents not unreason but the total mind, including both reason and unreason … Poetic creation has been described by some poets—Wordsworth and Keats come to mind—as a heightened state of consciousness brought about, curiously, by an infusion of the unconscious … The images are connected in a dream; and the deeper the dream, the stronger, the more logical, are the connections.”

If these excerpts from Simpson's essay will not do to describe all the tendencies apparent in American poetry at present (and they were not intended to do so), they have a genuine applicability to Simpson's own recent work, to the poetry of Robert Bly, James Wright, W. S. Merwin, Donald Hall, and James Dickey—though one must say at once that these poets differ distinctly from one another too. Open this new volume of Dickey's poems [Poems 1957-1967] (which gathers together the larger part of his four previous books and concludes with a book-length section of recent pieces) at any page and you find the artistic realization of Simpson's statement: a poetry which indeed seems composed of “images … connected in a dream.” Night and sleep, dominated by moonlight (as in Wallace Stevens), moreover, take a prominent place in many of the poems, from “Sleeping Out at Easter” from Into the Stone (his first book) to “The Birthday Dream” from the new section entitled Falling. But even when he is not directly treating sleep Dickey has a power of imagination that fulfills itself in dreamlike effects. Take, for instance, the initial stanza of “A Screened Porch in the Country.” The situation is so ordinary—a group of people sitting inside a lighted porch on a summer night, their enlarged, distended shadows cast outward onto the surrounding grass—and the imaginative rendering of its implications so extraordinary that the reader's habitual way of looking at things, as with Rilke's “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” is profoundly shaken. Here, too, one must “change [his] life,” or at least his conception of it:

All of them are sitting
Inside a lamp of coarse wire
And being in all directions
Shed upon darkness,
Their bodies softening to shadow, until
They come to rest out in the yard
In a kind of blurred golden country
In which they more deeply lie
Than if they were being created
Of Heavenly light.

Dickey's imaginative processes free the body of its earthly ties and permit it a kind of infinite capacity for extension. In the passage above a transformation occurs within the poet's vision which locates human bodies in an entirely different dimension; their shadows come to possess their spiritual being or constitute its reflection. The ingredients of the external occasion, as already noted, are commonplace, but Dickey's sudden intense visualization stuns us with the revelation of a hidden metaphysical or religious insight. For the poem proceeds to describe a species of metempsychosis—although, of course, no literal death is involved and the inhabitants of the screened porch are not even consciously aware of the curious spiritual transmigration in which they are participating with their shadow selves—that brings the “souls” of these people into communion with the world of small night creatures and insects who come only to the edge of “the golden shadow / Where the people are lying.” The reader finally gets the haunting feeling of having shared deeply in the life of creation and so loosened the boundaries of the selfish ego. Here are the other three stanzas that complete the poem.

Where they are floating beyond
Themselves, in peace,
Where they have laid down
Their souls and not known it,
The smallest creatures,
As every night they do,
Come to the edge of them
And sing, if they can,
Or, if they can't, simply shine
Their eyes back, sitting on haunches,
Pulsating and thinking of music.
Occasionally, something weightless
Touches the screen
With its body, dies,
Or is unmurmuringly hurt,
But mainly nothing happens
Except that a family continues
To be laid down
In the midst of its nightly creatures,
Not one of which openly comes
Into the golden shadow
Where the people are lying,
Emitted by their own house
So humanly that they become
More than human, and enter the place
Of small, blindly singing things,
Seeming to rejoice
Perpetually, without effort,
Without knowing why
Or how they do it.

This poem provides merely one example—and that not so obvious as might be—of what H. L. Weatherby has called “the way of exchange” and Robert Bly terms “spiritual struggle” in Dickey's poems.¹ Most evident at first in his pieces about animals and hunting, where the poet almost miraculously divides his intuitive powers so as to depict his own inner state in the role of human perceiver or hunter and the sensations of the animal who knows he is pursued, the notion of exchange has far-reaching effects, which include an interpenetration of the worlds of the living and the dead in such poems as “In the Tree House at Night,” “The Owl King,” “Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek,” “Drinking from a Helmet,” “Reincarnation (I),” and “Sled Burial, Dream Ceremony.” It also, more generally, encompasses the imaginative devices of bodily and spiritual extension, metamorphosis, and metempsychosis of which I have spoken. All of these characteristics, and in addition a preoccupation (strong in his first three books and still present in more recent work) with ritual and archetypal modes of experience, confirm Dickey as a poet who possesses an imagination of a primitive, magical type. Obviously, he is at the same time a modern man of considerable sophistication; but the fact that he hunts with bow and arrow and that he has been a decorated fighter pilot in both World War II and the Korean War indicates something of the broad spectrum of his experience.

The themes of Dickey's best poetry, however, have a timeless aura about them; and while contemporary material and various objects of modern technology necessarily appear in places in his writing, they are simply appropriated and subordinated to the larger concerns at hand. (At any rate, this seems a fair account until we come to some of the poems from Buckdancer's Choice—“The Firebombing,” for example.) Thus in “Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek” the poet and his brother, who has a mine detector to locate buried metal, “mess tin or bullet,” find that this mechanical instrument becomes the means for entering into a state of near-mystical communion with the soldiers who died on this battle ground. As his brother listens through the ear-phones of the detector, Dickey sees his face transformed by a new awareness, strange and awesome, of the way of communication he has unwittingly opened up with the past and the dead; and the brother's expression, in turn, communicates that awareness in all its uncanny force to the poet until he, too, has been captured by the same experience:

We climb the bank;
A faint light glows
On my brother's mouth.
I listen, as two birds fight
For a single voice, but he
Must be hearing the grave,
In pieces, all singing
To his clamped head,
For he smiles as if
He rose from the dead within
Green Nimblewill
And stood in his grandson's shape.

Here we are close to the idea of exchange between the dead and the living or a transmigration of souls, though it is viewed in this instance not as a literal fact but an unforgettable moment of perception among the living—the poet and his brother. The end of the poem finds Dickey arrived at the threshold of a profoundly moving recovery of his (and our) human ancestry:

I choke the handle
Of the pick, and fall to my knees
To dig wherever he points,
To bring up mess tin or bullet,
To go underground
Still singing, myself,
Without a sound,
Like a man who renounces war,
Or one who shall lift up the past,
Not breathing “Father,”
At Nimblewill,
But saying, “Fathers! Fathers!”

The details of this passage are enormously evocative. His kneeling posture and his careful excavation of relics imply a reverential attitude towards the dead, who are resurrected, as it were, in the poet's inwardness, in feeling and imagination, to enlarge his own humanity so that it knows no limits but flows outward to merge with the being of every creature and thing, and, beyond them, to touch at times the realm of the supernatural. The act of digging, as the stanza discloses, takes on the aspect of a descent into the kingdom of the dead, and the poet returns with his new knowledge upon him: the revelation which becomes his poem. In his well-known study The Poetic Image C. Day Lewis notes that a whole poem may be an image composed of smaller contributing images; and of that larger image he offers a general definition which is surely applicable to the poem we have been discussing and also to a fundamental impulse running through Dickey's finest pieces. “The poetic image,” he remarks, “is the human mind claiming kinship with everything that lives or has lived, and making good its claim.”

A little further on, to stay with Day Lewis, he says that the poet is “in the world … to bear witness to the principle of love, since love is as good a word as any for that human reaching-out of hands towards the warmth in all things, which is the source and passion of his song.” Plainly enough, this statement elaborates what its author said about the poetic image, only in this instance he looks behind the work for its underlying (whether conscious or not) intention. James Dickey's poems are truly remarkable in just this respect. “The Owl King,” which is too long for discussion here, can be read as a mythic poem of initiation and exchange between human life and the rest of creation basic to Dickey's imaginative sympathies. In “The Salt Marsh” and “Inside the River” the poet submits himself to two different experiences in which his own being is altered by elements of the natural world. The concluding lines of “Inside the River” have again the ritual symbolic significance we grow familiar with in Dickey's work:

Move with the world
As the deep dead move,
Opposed to nothing.
Release. Enter the sea
Like a winding wind.
No. Rise. Draw breath.
Sing. See no one.

The beautiful poem “Drinking from a Helmet” describes the incredible changes that occur when a soldier on some Pacific island (presumably some version of the poet himself, as most of Dickey's speakers appear to be) picks up the helmet of a dead countryman to hold his water ration. First, he sees his own reflection on the water's surface framed by the helmet's edges, so he seems to be wearing, in this mirror-image, with safety what another was killed in. As he continues to drink and then to contemplate what remains of the water, his own reflection is replaced by other sorts of details which in their suggestiveness point the direction the speaker's experience now takes:

At the middle of water
Bright circles dawned inward and outward
Like oak rings surviving the tree
As its soul, or like
The concentric gold spirit of time.
I kept trembling forward through something
Just born of me.

The next two stanzas are devoted to an evocation of the dead (“I fought with a word in the water / To call on the dead to strain / Their muscles and get up …”), but we are told that “the dead cannot rise up” though “their last thought hovers somewhere / For whoever finds it.” Dickey does find it; and in the eight stanzas that follow there is an elaboration and intensification of the kind of experience rendered in “Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek.” The speaker feels himself “possessed,” filled out from within by something “swallowed whole” from the helmet, and attains to a sense of rebirth and immortality: he has absorbed and revivified in some mystical fashion the person of the dead soldier and has obviously been transformed himself in the process. Subsequently, he discards his own helmet and puts on the one he has found:

Warmed water ran over my face.
My last thought changed, and I knew
I inherited one of the dead.

That is to say, the speaker's own thoughts die with his cast-off helmet; he assumes the dead soldier's final thought with his headgear and seems to be baptized with the last of the water into a new life. The inherited thought is really a vision drawn from the deceased's past, apparently the final flash of memory across his dying mind, and shows two boys talking in a forest of gigantic redwood trees. The two closing sections of the poem envisage the speaker's destiny: he will survive the war and journey afterwards in search of the dead soldier's brother to carry to him the experience of possession and the life-concluding memory which the helmet has conveyed:

XVIII

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:

XIX

And tell him I was the man.

The claim of kinship mentioned by C. Day Lewis is powerfully realized in this poem, and the speaker provides a link between the dead and the living, between the lost soldier and his brother, that lengthens out the pattern of relations beyond those of “Hunting Civil War Relics at Nimblewill Creek” by reaching from time past toward time future. (The conditional tense of the final portion, like the significance of the poem's last line, makes for a certain ambiguity with regard to the speaker's actual location in time and his identity, but such indefiniteness does not detract from the reader's impression of temporal movement.) Yet the very strength of the human bonds Dickey creates in this poem leads one to wonder all the more at the moral abyss which separates it from the piece that begins his next volume, Buckdancer's Choice.

“The Firebombing,” clearly based on the poet's experiences as a night-fighter pilot on bombing missions in Asia during World War II, starts off with nocturnal recollections, entertained years later in the seemingly secure American suburbs, of what he has done to others—burned them alive with napalm, destroyed their property, killed their animals—and the attempt (not very strenuous, I fear, at least in the context of the poem) to project himself into their place, to suffer and understand, and so in part at any rate to expiate his actions. But in spite of an epigraph from the Book of Job (“Or has thou an arm like God?”) and another one from the contemporary German poet Günter Eich (untranslated as epigraph, but in Vernon Watkins' version from Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton's Modern German Poetry 1910-1960 it reads: “Think of this, after the great destructions / Everyone will prove that he was innocent”), some lines near the beginning already imply that the effort to awaken such emotions is doomed to failure:

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

The flat, impersonal tone of that last sentence is rather indicative of the results of Dickey's attempt—which purportedly comprises the substance of the poem—to “feel for” his deeds, his victims, because close to the end he can tell us that he is “still unable / To get down there or see / What really happened.” We cannot quarrel with the apparent honesty of this statement. If the poet is incapable of entering the experience of his victims, there is little to be done about it—though we may recall, with a start, his amazing imaginative sympathies with the animals he hunts. Yet in a bizarre, contradictory way the bulk of the poem concentrates on the re-creation of its author's feelings and perceptions during a night raid with napalm bombs on Japanese civilian, rather than military, objectives. Again, as in some of the hunting poems, we see the poet dividing himself in imagination between his own consciousness and a simultaneous intuition of the existence of the hunted; but it is here precisely in “The Firebombing” that Dickey's imaginative gift collapses at the moral level. While he offers us dramatic impressions of his flight and weaponry (the headiness of power becomes quite plain—and terrifying) and of the imagined horror and destruction wrought upon the land below and its inhabitants by his attack, he expends poetic energy on the creation of images through which these events and details are dramatized without ever arousing a commensurate moral—which is to say, human—awareness. In other words, the poet would appear to be re-living this segment of his past more for aesthetic than for any other reasons, for the pain and terror of his victims are dwelt on and vividly presented (though without sympathy) even when we are going to be told at the conclusion that he “can imagine / At the threshold nothing / With its ears crackling off / Like powdery leaves, / Nothing with children of ashes …” Perhaps I am misjudging Dickey's underlying impulse, but if I am the poem still holds puzzling inconsistencies. Robert Bly, who has written a second essay on Dickey's work, a sharp but not quite just criticism of Buckdancer's Choice,² notes some instances of rather weak irony and self-criticism in the poem, of “complaint” about the pilot-speaker who can feel no remorse for his actions, but certainly such qualifications are almost unnoticeable. Here is a passage which describes the moment the pilot releases his napalm and the holocaust that follows (something Dickey has no difficulty in imagining). References to “anti-morale” raids, “Chicago” fire, and “all American” fire, while they may be intended to serve an ironical-critical function in their context, are feeble by comparison with the overall effect of a fascinated exulting in destructive force, in the superiority of flight and the malevolent artistry of bombing:

The ship shakes bucks
Fire hangs not yet fire
In the air above Beppu
For I am fulfilling
An “anti-morale” raid upon it.
All leashes of dogs
Break under the first bomb, around those
In bed, or late in the public baths: around those
Who inch forward on their hands
Into medicinal waters.
Their heads come up with a roar
Of Chicago fire:
Come up with the carp pond showing
The bathouse upside down,
Standing stiller to show it more
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.
With fire of mine like a cat
Holding onto another man's walls,
My hat should crawl on my head
In streetcars, thinking of it,
The fat on my body should pale.

The self-reproach of the last stanza above is hollow and meaningless next to the fierce delight of re-living that period of godlike superiority. Perhaps Dickey will not try to prove himself innocent, as Günter Eich's poem suggests men do, and that is fine. But Dickey also departs sharply from the spirit of Eich's conclusion, which states: “Think of this, that you are responsible for every atrocity / Enacted far from you.” Further on, he makes other gestures aimed toward compassion and feeling; he remarks that “detachment” and “the greatest sense of power in one's life” should be “shed” (apparently by either one or the other odd means of getting drunk or adopting a severe diet), though in the course of the poem these statements again amount to very little. What is strong, vivid, and passionate in “The Firebombing” springs directly from the occasion which gave the poem its title and from the poet's participation in it; any real concern for the terrible fate imposed upon others seems secondary.

A similar failing is evident in such poems as “The Fiend” and “Slave Quarters,” both of which employ speakers whose chief desire is the fulfillment, through a warped masculine sexual power, of their own sick fantasies. The knife-carrying, middle-aged voyeur of the first poem and the lustful slave-owner (whose ghostly body the poet enters and joins with) of the second are victims of their private delusions: neither can escape from his diseased view and both are determined to realize their fantasies as fact, though the realization must inevitably do violence to others. In these poems, then, one finds a sort of lyricism of the perverse with little else to be said for it. But Dickey demonstrates here, as in “The Firebombing,” an obsession with power and the imposition of will—and a total insensitivity to the persons who are the objects of its indulgence. Admittedly, “Slave Quarters” is the more ambitious poem and attempts in some ways a more difficult feat of understanding; still it is, for me, imaginatively deficient.

Among the recent poems from the lengthy section entitled Falling, I believe we must find notable instances of a diminishing of Dickey's poetic intensity, though such a comment does not everywhere apply. Nonetheless, a regrettable straining after material and effect—perhaps really after novelty—seems to me fatally injurious to most of the longer pieces: “May Day Sermon …” “Falling,” “Sun,” “Reincarnation (II),” and “Coming Back to America.” Faults frequently pointed out by Dickey's critics are painfully evident in “Falling” and “May Day Sermon …”: these poems are drawn out, repetitive, overwritten, blurred, and diffuse; the ‘ideas’ behind them are contrived, and in the case of “Falling,” cannot be sustained even by Coleridge's “willing suspension of disbelief.” Finally, except for striking passages or images, these poems become boring.

This verdict should not be taken as wholly negative, however, for Dickey can still write poems with the energy and imagination which distinguishes his finest work from Drowning with Others and Helmets (by far his best books). “The Birthday Dream,” “The Leap,” “Snakebite,” “Sustainment,” “The Head-Aim,” and “Deer Among Cattle,” as well as others, are examples of good Dickey poems. I quote “Deer Among Cattle”:

Here and there in the searing beam
Of my hand going through the night meadow
They all are grazing
With pins of human light in their eyes.
A wild one also is eating
The human grass,
Slender, graceful, domesticated
By darkness, among the bred-
for-slaughter,
Having bounded their paralyzed fence
And inclined his branched forehead onto
Their green frosted table,
The only live thing in this flashlight
Who can leave whenever he wishes,
Turn grass into forest,
Foreclose inhuman brightness from his eyes
But stands here still, unperturbed,
In their wide-open country,
The sparks from my hand in his pupils
Unmatched anywhere among cattle,
Grazing with them the night of the hammer
As one of their own who shall rise.

At the top of his form Dickey does reveal a large capacity for feeling, for steeping his spirit in the being of others and in the very life of creation; and we think of the poets with whom his most authentic poems have their affinity: Whitman, Lawrence, Roethke; and among the younger: James Wright, Jon Silkin, Robert Bly, Donald Hall, W. S. Merwin; perhaps some European poets as well. But these affinities are broken in the poems which are morally insensate.

Dickey is a prolific writer, to judge from the size of a decade's production, and he has won sudden fame and publicity. Large reputations—we know it as a commonplace—can be exceedingly dangerous in the pressures they bring always to be new and inventive (the blight of the contemporary painter and sculptor) in order to maintain one's laurels, especially in a culture dedicated to the modish and to consumer consumption of artistic goods; and a poet of Dickey's strengths can be damaged as easily as can a lesser one. I hope that will not happen, for he is, defects aside, a very gifted, truly imaginative poet who has already given us excellent pieces. No doubt his work must alter and grow toward full maturity,³ but its developments need to derive from inner necessity and not in answer to the external demands of reputation or public role. In any event, this collection of Dickey's poetry is an important book; it merits attentive reading—and its readers will be far from unrewarded.

Notes

1. “The Way of Exchange in James Dickey's Poetry,” Sewanee Review, Summer 1966, and “The Poetry of James Dickey,” The Sixties, Winter 1964, respectively. Readers should also see Norman Friedman: “The Wesleyan Poets, II” Chicago Review, 19, 1, 1966; and Michael Goldman: “Inventing the American Heart,” The Nation, April 24, 1967.

2. In The Sixties, 9, 1967.

3. Dickey has written an interesting account of his history and aims as a poet in “The Poet Turns on Himself,” included in Poets on Poetry, edited by Howard Nemerov (New York: Basic Books, 1966), which I had not seen at the time of writing this essay. He offers there some important comments on his more recent poetry.