W&M ScholarWorks Arts & Sciences Articles Arts and Sciences Winter 2016 The Clamor of James Dickey Henry Hart College of William and Mary, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/aspubs Recommended Citation Hart, Henry, The Clamor of James Dickey (2016). SEWANEE REVIEW, 124(1). 10.1353/sew.2016.0026 This Other is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts and Sciences at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Articles by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CURRENT BOOKS IN REVIEW up there with my favorites—Emily the introductory material and notes), Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, and but there are numerous references to Elizabeth Bishop. In my book, that’s Dickey’s big ambition and personality. the top. In the foreword, Richard Howard calls The Complete Poems “a copious, —George Monteiro clamorous amassment” and remarks: “There is a sense (or folly) in which James Dickey grew too big for mere poetry; the energy and intensity of his powers spilled (surely the right word) THE CLAMOR OF into fiction, into criticism, as well as JAMES DICKEY into a curious form of prose com­ mentary packed into several volumes The Complete Poems of James Dickey of self-interviews.” edited by Ward Briggs Following Howard’s lead, Briggs (University of South Carolina Press, emphasizes Dickey’s determination 2013. 960 pages. $85) to spill—like a river over dams—into new territory. When the confessional After I published a biography of style of poetry practiced by Robert James Dickey in 2000, a photog­ Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, rapher from a Virginia magazine and Anne Sexton was in vogue, asked me to come up with the one Dickey went his own way toward word that best summed up James something “larger, more inclusive,” Dickeys career. He planned to and more mythical. “The main thing take a picture of me and the word the poet must remember,” he is for an article about my biography. quoted as saying, was “never to be At first I resisted. How could I or bound by facts.” In his drive toward anyone encapsulate Dickeys prolific, bigger, more stimulating, and more multifaceted career in one word? The universal forms, Dickey in the 1960s photographer, however, insisted, and lengthened his fines until they filled I complied, although I tried to find the page like “a shimmering wall of a word that would at least do some words.” The fame he enjoyed after justice to Dickeys expansive personal­ the success of his novel Deliverance ity and career, and that would also and after President Jimmy Carter suggest that he could not be reduced invited him to read a poem at an to a single word. In the end, I wrote inauguration ceremony in 1977 BIG on the blackboard, and the only increased Dickey’s desire to photographer took his picture. expand into new styles and new Reading over The Complete Poems genres. As Briggs notes, Dickey was of James Dickey, edited by his friend a “larger-than-life poet” who was Ward Briggs, University of South always determined to take on new Carolina professor of classics emeri­ challenges. tus, I was reminded of my uncom­ One of the premises of my biog­ fortable session with the magazine raphy was that Dickey’s large talent photographer. Briggs’s book is not and large personality deserved a large only big (close to 1,000 pages with biography. Briggs, who contributed U CURRENT ROOKS IN REVIEW substantially to my understanding quests for salvation. The glittering of Dickeys “outsized personality',” gifts Dickey sees around him in works from a similar premise in The “Christmas Shopping, 1947” are Complete Poems. He begins with parodies of the original gifts of Christ Dickeys first poems published in and the Magi, but for Dickey they the Gadfly (a Vanderbilt student “bear single witness to the bartered magazine) and the Sewanee Review birth, recall // the lip, the sponge, during the late 1940s. Hundreds of the God-swung temple-lash” and pages later, he ends with Dickey’s Christ’s “five wounds” on the cross. elegy for F. Scott Fitzgerald, “poems They remind Dickey of mythical of uncertain date,” and two childrens heroes who deliver spiritual gifts after poems. “Christmas Shopping, 1947,” suffering exemplary ordeals. the opening poem in the collection, As a war veteran fascinated by gives glimpses of Dickeys remarkable religion and mythology, Dickey craftsmanship as an undergraduate gravitated toward Christ as a symbol and of the obsessions that would of lost innocence and transfiguring define his career. In alliterative lines ordeals. Many of his poems over the that echo Gerard Manley Hopkins next five decades would attempt to and the Beowulf poet (“grave glitter redress the situation he addressed of guilt and gift”), Dickey announces in his first published poem. If “the his opposition to the horde of current of the five wounds [of Christ] shoppers who seem oblivious to the fails” to connect with the masses and God that the Christmas holiday is “the igneous cross no longer lights supposed to commemorate. He also the mesh / and marrow of the hugely announces the origin of his gift as living,” Dickey would try to open the a poet. Although Briggs argues that circuit between personal wounds, the early in Dickey’s career, “tribal ritual” wounds of others, and the wounds of led him “to seek the truths of the godlike heroes who deliver redemp­ world by means of communion with tion. In his elegy for Fitzgerald, the darker mysteries of nature,” many “Entering Scott’s Night,” he com­ of Dickey’s early poems communed munes with yet another wounded with wounded people and sacrificial artist-god capable of redemptive gods who reminded him of his own healing. Observing himself “in the wounds. Having survived thirty-eight looking glass” as an emaciated figure missions as a radar observer in the wracked by illness, Dickey asks: “Am 418th Night Fighter Squadron in I my other” in a “dark-glowing field the Pacific during World War II, of folk” among “the dead”? On the Dickey found in Christ and those verge of death, he imagines entering who resembled Him examples of the a dream-vision, like Piers Plowman in way wounds could be redemptive. William Langland’s alliterative poem, Edmund Wilsons essay “The Wound and mingling with other wounded and the Bow,” anthropological studies heroes at a Gatsby-like party. of fertility gods, as well as modernist Dickey based many of his memo­ accounts of mystery cults no doubt rable narratives on the three-stage taught Dickey something about how journey of the mythical hero (depar­ wounds could spur creativity and ture, initiation, return) as elucidated Hi CURRENT ROOKS IN REVIEW by Arnold van Gennep and Joseph big for poetry,” Robbins declared: Campbell. Like modernists before “Poetry, even at its merest, is big him, he employed “the mythical enough for anything James Dickey method” to repair the broken circuit could have thrown at it. It’s rather between himself, his heroes, and that his own poetry grew too small his audience. The challenge for for its unruly grandiloquence” and Dickey’s priestly narrators and for too small for Dickey’s desire to give Dickey himself was to keep delivering “full-throated vent to an oracular the boon—the current of sublime, windiness.” uplifting energy—and to avoid the The poet and editor Peter Davison natural tendency to grow insulated may have set Dickey up for this sort from it with creature comforts. of attack when he wrote in a 1967 Although some critics believe that Atlantic Monthly article (quoted by Dickey moved from strength to both Briggs and Robbins) that Dickey strength throughout his fifty-year and his rival Robert Lowell were the career, the consensus is that his only two major poets of their genera­ numerous stylistic experiments during tion. Both Dickey and Lowell were the second half of his career failed hugely ambitious and, like the tragic to produce poems as consistently heroes that populated their writings, engaging as those written between both poets suffered reversals. Perhaps 1947 and 1970. prompted by Lowell’s restless Reactions to Briggs’s Complete cultivation of different styles, Dickey Poeins have illustrated the ongo­ also refused to settle into a fixed style. ing debate about Dickey’s career. Briggs quotes a statement Dickey Dickey’s admirers welcomed the made about one of his later volumes, capacious volume as evidence of Puella, that could stand as the motto the poet’s consistent level of accom­ for his ever-evolving career. “When plishment. Calling for “a reversion the exploratory sense dies out of it,” to sanity” after some of the cultic Dickey said about his writing, then celebrations of Dickey’s genius in the “the sense of adventure, the excite­ past, the poet Michael Robbins in a ment” dies, and writing in a particular review published in Poetry magazine style becomes “just a routine and praised Dickey’s Poems 1957-1967, that’s the last thing it should be. but disparaged much of what fol­ You have got to be prepared to fail lowed. In fact Robbins’s opposition to or to take a chance, to gamble.” Dickey’s later poems inspired what he Although the poetry Dickey wrote admitted was a “rant” against the sort after Poems 1957-1967 (about half of volume Briggs has edited. Once of The Complete Poems) may be less again, size was the issue. Briggs’s successful than what he called—with collection, according to Robbins, unfair self-deprecation—his “poetry was not only big, it was “gigantic,” of the versified anecdote,” his “enormous,” and “overpriced.” He willingness to take risks and make it argued: "You should not be able to new during the last three decades stun a moose with anyone’s Complete of his life was courageous.