Richard Howard
ON JAMES DICKEY
Of the late Randall Jarrell, James Dickey once wrote, in
his testy and cormorant collection of critical notes,
The Suspect in
Poetry:
"He gives you a foothold in a realm where literature itself
is inessential, where your own world is more yours than you could
ever have thought, or even felt, but is one you have always known. "
A close description of Dickey's own enterprise, and in its disputed
tone (the essay on Jarrell is cast as a dialogue between the critic's
warring allegiances to "form" and "life," each achievement "away"
from literature being hotly and harshly opposed by the literary con–
science, which is an impulse to get words down so they will keep) a
clue to this writer's ultimate yearning-that characteristic American
tendency Emerson dramatized when he said "every new writer
is
only a new crater of an old volcano"-that yearning to transcend,
by the flights and frauds of literature, literature itself, until the reader
is separated from the writer by no more than his response to his own
experience, and then united with that experience by a shared recogni–
tion of it.
The adventure of James Dickey's c.areer, the pursuit of a poetry
which must, in its transactions with love and death, self and circum–
stance, be as new as foam and as old as the rock (Emerson again), the
heroic quest which is this poet's unending venture begins with an ex–
pression already complete, gorged on miracle and complacent as
a sphere:
