James Dickey: The Selected Poems

Introduction

Introduction Robert Kirschten In Babel to Byzatium, his first book of criticism, published in 1968, James Dickey wrote the following about one of the most famous southern poets ofthe generation that preceded him: Opening a book by Robert Penn Warren is like putting out the light of the sun, or like plunging into the labyrinth and feeling the thread break after the first corner is passed. One will never come out in the same Selfas that in which one entered. When he is good, often when he is bad, you had as soon read Warren as live. (Babel to Byzatium 75) The movement of Dickey's expansive, outward-moving imagination is often the opposite of Warrens. However, the second half of this observation may as well be said of Dickey. Once the reader enters Dickey's magical and electrifying world, one does not come out "in the same Selfas that in which one entered." Transformation, transfiguration, and the dangers of the labyrinth are everywhere in James Dickey's literary universe, as many readers of his award-winning novel Deliverance can testify, along with viewers of the successful movie version. One recalls, especially, those who cut the thread to their everyday lives, which they risked by canoeing the rapids of the real Chattooga River in north Georgia in imitation of Dickey's novelistic group of adventuresome suburbanities who did the same on his fictional river, the Cahulawassee. Dickey resembles Warren in another important way, suggested by his own final observation. When he died in Columbia, South Carolina, on 19 January 1997, he left a rich legacy ofverse, prose fiction, and criticism, the central core of which consists of more than fifteen books of poems. Like the canons of many great visionary poets before him-Hart Crane's, Theodore Roethke's, and Dylan Thomas's, to name but three-Dickey's work contains many lyrics of major importance. Yet, also like the work of these writers, his collected poems-in Dickey's case, The Whole Motion, which appeared in 1992-include a number of lesser pieces that do not show him in his best light. The Whole Motion should remain of interest to those who wish to view the entire arc ofDickey's poetic development from the early fifties to his latest, single volume in 1990, The Eagle's Mile. However , because ofhis recent death, it is time for a reassessment ofhis poetry, and it is the purpose ofthis Selected Poems to gather and showcase his very best material for that reassessment. Dickey works most effectively in four major poetic modes, and the reader will find considerable evidence of his genius in each of these, often in conjunction, in the following pages. First, he dramatizes a wonderfully refreshing, pragmatic mysticism, propelled by a hypnotic ground rhythm and vision of the earth that emotionally unifies numerous opposites-life and death, permanance and change, humans and nature-in a mesmerizing method, which, as William James documented in The Varieties ofReligious Experience, lies at the heart of many religions. This mystical motion may be found in poems such as "The Tree House at Night" and "Sleeping out at Easter." Second, Dickey employs an ancient, cosmological proportion between motion and music, which strongly resembles the Greek notion of "harmonia." Like the universe of Pythagoras, the rhythms of human fortune and the rhythms of the movement of stars in Dickey's world are expressable in musical principles. His musical scale can movingly recapture lost love and sentiment in the "new music long long/ past" in "Mary Sheffield" or unify disparate cultures in a time of war through the magical "music-wood" ofhis guitar in "The Rain Guitar." Dickey's third central mode of poetic motion is romantic. Like that of his modern predecessor Theodore Roethke, Dickey's romanticism reintroduces the renovative emotional topics of the great English nature poetssuch as "freshness of sensation," plus renewal-through-the-macabrewhile enhancing the contemporary reader's entrance into nature in both its tranquil and obsessive aspects. In "Listening to Foxhounds," Dickey's speaker gently participates in the movement of animal instinct of a fox, while in "Madness" it is a rabid fox that bites a family hound and turns him into a sacred, nonretaliatory scapegoat that must be hunted down and killed. Finally, Dickey's primitivism reveals the pervasive power of myth, ritual, and ceremony in human experience, especially in his two most famous women's poems, "May Day Sermon" and "Falling." In both these long lyrics-probably his best...