Word: dickey
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...about "the ghost or two"--the handful of fragile souls that Jarrell forsesaw clustering about his grave? Instead we have nothing less than the United States Cultural All-Star Team. Robert Lowell, John Berryman, John Crowe Ransom, Marianne Moore, James Dickey, Allen Tate, Robert Fitzgerald, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Leslie A. Fiedler, Hannah Arendt, all take the podium...
This hint of nihilism in his death, helps explain the emotional flood it called forth from American poets. Some of the tributes are extravagant. "His poems give you a feel of a time, our time, as no other poetry of our century dies," James Dickey says. Even when Jarrell was in college, Ransom writes, "you knew that he had to become one of the important people in the literature of our time." Robert Watson is more to the point when he says, Randall Jarrell "looked open-eyed at the delights and horrors or our time...
...Dickey reads his poems at a rapid clip in a loud, racy voice. Most poets simply intone; Dickey almost roars. His performance in Lowell Lecture Hall featured more commentary than poetry; his gift as a raconteur tends to run away with him. In the space of about fifty minutes he read perhaps seven shortish poems, the balance of time being taken up with tales of Civil War relics and films about Jean Harlow. His audience ate it up. His touch of natural Southern rhetoric is quickly evident; he is somewhat oratorical even in conversation. His whole manner is flavored with...
Opinions like these are not likely to endear' Dickey to certain academic coteries. Such people are also annoyed at the crashingly bourgeois publicity campaign that seems to accompany him wherever he goes. (Dickey has had the full Life magazine treatment, with photographs of him in his various uniforms.) More to the point, his critics deplore the occasional unrevised look of his poems--and certainly he can be, at times, both prolix and dull. Some would call him tasteless, but after all, tastes differ...
...Dickey's defense lies both in his ambition and his achievement. He is trying to write poems for which there are no precedents; therefore some slips are to be expected, if not fully condoned. And it is a fact which few could challenge that Dickey's brief career has already produced a handful of poems that can be set with the very best of this period--poems like "The Performance," "The Firebombing," "Fox Blood," and "For the Last Wolverine...