After Dickey spent five and a half years juggling office responsibilities while submitting poetry to little magazines, he published two collections, Into the Stone and Other Poems (1960) and Drowning with Others (1962). A Guggenheim Fellowship temporarily placed him in Europe in 1961 to compose and study language while he wrote Helmets (1964), a collection of war poems. In 1963, he returned to the classroom as writer-in-residence at Reed College, San Fernando Valley State University, and George Washington University while completing Interpreter's House (1963) and Two Poems of the Air (1964).
Dickey surprised those who typified him as a slightly scruffy good-timer. Under the influence of Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, James Agee, and a Southern literary group known as the Fugitive Agrarians, he mastered technique and structure. Among his verse characterizations are astronauts of the first Apollo moon landing, a woman suffering heart disease, and a man battling cancer.
