Arts and Letters

Heroic poetry is rare in modern culture, a poetry in which certain imaginings of somatic trial, myths of the body proving itself against all comers—the body itself chief among such disputants—are sometimes perceived as a noble sport or quest, more often as the military necessity. Such engagements determine, or at least identify what men can make of themselves against the gods, thereby displacing them. From Homer to Hemingway; such ordeals have been created by a company of valiant makers to which it is now our obligation to add the name of James Dickey.

His are the legends of prowess, survival, ritual sacrifice, the themes of tribal loyalty and individual betrayal, wherein the declarative rhythms march into the light, and into the darkness, with all the violent rigor of which the imagination is capable.

Under such pressure, in James Dickey's hands, it is capable of reality. In his three novels, and in the high-spirited attitudes which dictate his criticism of himself and of his colleagues, readers who know the poetry will recognize these same themes, these arguments, and will rejoice in the mastery which conjugated the excruciating endurance of the Iliad with the limitless endeavors of The Boy's Own Paper.

In that grand body of poetry which represents an astonishing decade of invention (1957-67) and which Dickey himself, with characteristic generosity; liked to refer to as the whole motion, the poet managed, in his account of a multiform spiritual journey or ascensus, to reconcile the starkest vocabulary of transcendence with the lush nature of the red-earth country:

While the world fades, it is becoming.
As the trees shut away all seeing,
in my mouth I mix it with sunlight.
Here, in the dark, it is being.

In thematic control, in sureness of their subject, the poems of this decade are so resolved that we would be at a loss—and quite happy to remain there—to identify the point where the poet's abiding struggle with himself might be located, were it not for the aura of incantation, of litany, that Dickey employs, though he has painfully and steadily sought to rid himself of the ritual imagination, or rather, rejecting ritual as something given, instead he has cast it ahead of himself as something to be found, invented.

Though Dickey always retained, for strategic use, the rhythms he early developed to be the beat (surely the right word) by which he most naturally timed himself and entrusted his consciousness to language, it is evident that a formal metamorphosis occurred after Buckdancer's Choice to accommodate that other change, the transformation of ritual into what we may call romance, which Dickey has affected in his later poetry, and in all the writing of his later life.

For the most part, Dickey's universe and the measures which accommodate his phenomenology of exchange, a world of available correspondences, ceased to be one of eternal return, of ritual enchantment. Instead, fallen out of eternity, the poet confronted and explored (or implored) the outrage of individual death, of a linear movement within time, each event and each moment being unique, unrepeatable, therefore lost.

Obsession, madness, excess, this was a new burden in the second half of this poet's life, a burden crowned or ballasted by a pervasive terror of extinction. Dickey sought renewal, transcendence, ecstasy in his own person and by any means, at all costs. At all costs to the art as well as to the artist's life, he sought and spoke for a triumph over death, a transformation within the merely mortal body, praying somehow to live, convulsively, explosively, beyond the norms of utterance.

In the last books of poetry James Dickey wrote, we discover that this vision cannot be socialized, it can scarcely be shared—it can only be given—given away, given over. Forswearing all decorums, this poet casts the entire process of poetry as he himself had once practiced and proved it, into an ecstasy without fixtures, an awakening without constants, a sublimity without negation. From a fallen life, an ageing body, a disgraceful age, James Dickey craved not identity nor even delectation, but Deliverance, as his best novel is called, and his impatience with the procedures of tradition, his fury with the delations of biography, mine out and often undermine the meaning of his search, even as they no longer exploit, but merely explode, the means.

When it is said that a man has fallen, as I have just said of Dickey and he so often says of himself, this latest Lucifer, though he says that he is falling:

Falling back
back to the body-raising fire…
back from the darkside
of the mind…

and when his world is called a fallen world, what is meant is that our soul, our aspirations, our hungers have collapsed into our present—our present body, our present landscape, our present society—and that the instruments of our longed-for transcendence are at the same time the tools of our undoing: as James Dickey laments and exalts, resurrection for a little while.

Contradictions between life as we know it to be and life as we make it up for ourselves, these terrible reversals of what is given and what is taken, generate for this heroic poet a now-familiar vocabulary of rising and falling, burning, turning, and submitting (to list his five favorite gerunds) which can accommodate any experience, even the most trivial, even the most degrading, and even most preposterously grandiose (such as being the Life Magazine laureate on the occasion of the first moon-shot).

In the unfallen world to which these poems aspire, which they sometimes approach, and which they even at appalling moments create; in the risen world, then, James Dickey's poetry of hunting and warfare becomes the epic of search and struggle. That is the consummation of these texts, which insist upon anguish and madness, which in their eccentric presentment on the page rehearse a doomed mortality. The cost to his art has been tremendous, for it has cost him poems themselves—there are no poems in the later work, I mean to say, there is only poetry; the cost to himself, he reckons up in a terrible litany of losses ("a liveable death at last"). What he gained was a giant utterance, the expression of a state where, as he liked to put it, in capital letters, of course:

YOU ARE RELEASED TO ALL OTHERS,
ALL PLACES AND TIMES OF ALL…
DEAD, IMMORTAL, OR COMING.

It was my friend the poet James Dickey's unique achievement to see the risen world "through" the other, fallen one; to accede to an immortal vision through what he called "an enormous green bright growing NO / that frees forever." The defeats of such a career are those that can be met by anyone, but the victories—as our literature shall henceforth account them—are the victories won by a hero.