In answer to the question “Does regional verse still flourish?” James Lafayette Dickey, a giant among mid-to-late twentieth-century Southern poets, provided a yes—a definitive sense of place and person. Dickey, who is grouped with Randall Jarrell, William Styron, Ralph Ellison, and Ernest Gaines, has earned praise for probing internal monologues and for studies of life forces, which thrust into scenes of joy, pain, birth, confrontation, survival, and death. His style, a blend of visionary and humanistic, accommodated a wide-ranging curiosity that refused to be satisfied by surface knowledge.
Dickey was an Atlantan, born February 2, 1923. He excelled in football at North Fulton High and was struggling through his freshman year at Clemson when he enlisted in the United States Army Air Corps. While he was based near Luzon during World War II, he flew a hundred missions over Okinawa and Japan with a decorated bomber squadron, the 418th Night Fighters. On returning from the war, he graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. from Vanderbilt. After he completed an M.A. from Vanderbilt, he taught one semester on the English faculty of Rice Institute, then was recalled to the military to train pilots. He earned an ace’s renown and an Air Medal in the Korean War for bravery in combat.
Because of his service in two wars, Dickey took a long time to produce verse. In postwar adulthood, he taught once more at Rice and the University of Florida while publishing in Partisan Review, Harper’s, and Atlantic Monthly. While on the staff of McCann-Erickson in New York, he wrote copy for Coca-Cola and crafted advertisements for Lay’s Potato Chips and Delta Airlines.
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.
Dickey arrived when he received a National Book Award for Buckdancer’s Choice (1965). At this time he lived on Lake Katherine in Columbia, South Carolina, with his wife, Maxine Syerson Dickey, and younger son Kevin. He reached a new audience with an ominous best-selling adventure novel, Deliverance (1970), set on an undesignated river north of Atlanta. Two years later, the story made an even more menacing film.
Dickey achieved less critical impact in the last decades of his career, when he published The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970), The Zodiac (1976), and Puella (1982), as well as two volumes of poetic prose: Jericho: The South Beheld (1974), illustrated by painter Hubert Shuptrine; and God’s Images (1977). His novels include Alnilam (1987) and To the White Sea (1993), and five critical volumes: The Suspect in Poetry (1964), Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now (1968), Self-Interviews (1970), Sorties (1974), and Night Hurdling: Poems, Essays, Conversations, Commencements, and Afterwords (1983).
Dickey died on January 19, 1997, from alcoholism and lung fibrosis.
