Word: dickeys
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...class wondered if readers tended to identify the poet with this persona. Dickey replied, "Yes, and that's not the first time that's happened. The best letter I ever had on a poem was an unsigned letter with no return address, from New York City. Someone wrote to me and said, 'I recently read your poem "The Fiend" in the Partisan Review. I'm a member of the New York City Police Department--the vice squad--and I just wanted you to know, Mr. Dickey, that I've always had a lot of sympathy for you fellows.'. . . The real...
...Dickey expands on these ideas in short homilies on the "new morality": "You go to hear ministers in church and you have a feeling that you're listening to fossils. They talk about honor and chastity--who believes in those things anymore? We know the delights of the sexual relationship. . . . Nowadays if you want to f---somebody, you do, if he or she is willing. You just do it for whatever there can be for both of you. This is why The Scarlet Letter is so quaint to us--all that agitation about fornication...
...feels that Dickey's ultimate concerns are not with the problems of the moment. The more enduring, if less controversial aspect of his poetry is its treatment of man's communion with nature, a theme which he handles with an insight that is unique in modern poetry...
...Dickey says, "I have a very definite feeling about the connections of men and the world as it was before men themselves began to reconstruct it according to either commercial propensities or the heart's desire. I like the connection of the human body with natural, unadorned things, with lakes, especially with rivers, with trees, also with clouds--also with animals and birds. That seems to be restorative and life-giving; it seems to key the human being in bodily sense with the flux of existence. . . . My interest is in man as a very simple hunting and food-gathering, hopefully...
...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...