Dickey believed in the power of Imagination so much (with the Romantic’s capital “I”) that he thought — through poetry — he might actually alter reality. This is the impetus behind his poem, “A Birth,” in which he imagines a horse in a field which then steps out of the poem to become a real horse in a real field, alive and breathing. Of course, this isn’t true, but Dickey is trying to will it to be true. To make contact with the occult, the metaphysical, is his true ambition. His poems are attempts to record those efforts, to invest his writing with the numinous so that the reader will feel the hair stand up on the back of his neck. This is the holy dread the ancients claimed to feel in the presence of the supernatural, and points back towards the revelations of the insane and their dangerous clairvoyance. Dickey is not a religious poet, like Herbert or Hopkins, but he is shamanistic in his approach to nature. In this, he is related to D. H. Lawrence and Robinson Jeffers whose forays into pantheism imbue their poetry with the same aura of transcendence: how to get beyond ourselves and look back at the human world with otherworldly eyes, the way the sheep child views his “father’s house” from inside the eternity of his immortal waters.

The Whole Motion:
Collected Poems, 1945–1992
BY James Dickey
(Wesleyan University Press, 1992)

At the beginning of his career, Dickey was able to do this seemingly at will. His first four or five books are filled with a poetic magic that few others in America at that time were able to manage. These books include Into the Stone (1960), Drowning with Others (1962), Helmets (1964), Buckdancer’s Choice (1965), and perhaps Falling, May Day Sermon, and Other Poems (1981) (though as far as I know the last of these was never a separate book but a scattering of poems written about the same time as the first four books and gathered together in The Whole Motion: Collected Poems (1992) from Wesleyan University Press). “May Day Sermon,” while it contains some powerful passages and local brilliancies is essentially a failure, while his other long poem, “Falling,” succeeds — possibly because it is a narrative and presents us with a central event that helps to hold the poem together as it unfolds. Whenever Dickey self-consciously gathers himself up to become The Bard, as in another long poem, “Dover: Believing in Kings” and even “The Owl King,” his ability to sustain the power of his art flags. He seems to be able to summon the best of himself and concentrate his mind only in brief moments of lucidity. The shorter poems in his earlier books, even before they are completely understood, sear themselves into the mind. Dickey needs the tautness and precision of these lines in order to hold his Imagination in check. When he doesn’t, as in “May Day Sermon,” the wildness gets away from him and he whirls images out of himself hoping they might cohere into something fantastic.

Too often, they don’t.

By the time he reached The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970), his poetry had become distinctly self-parodic and willful. Even the title of the book above attests to the over-the-top, frenetic style he eventually cultivated. “The Eye-Beaters,” “May Day Sermon,” “The Zodiac,” “Exchanges” and even the shorter poems in his later books read more like fever dreams than poetry. By codifying the elements of his style and writing poems out of a rigid formula, albeit his own, he diluted his work. I attribute this falling off to three things: the self-consciousness that eventually marked his work; the fact that he began writing novels shortly after finishing his earlier work in poetry; and his abandonment of the anapestic meter he had carefully developed in order to give his poems the spellbinding, incantatory power he initially sought. Once he let go of this, his poems began to scatter themselves around the page and lose the tension they once had. The phrases become more abstract and condensed. Concrete imagery gives way to thought, all of which might be seen by comparing the following examples. First, from “The Movement of Fish,” in Drowning with Others, in which Dickey is closely and painstakingly observing the behavior of water:

There is a clarity here, and a rigorous focus that does not allow for excess. Dickey’s imagination is fully engaged and concentrated on what he is seeing — even in his mind’s eye. Language and form do not obscure his subject. In “Falling,” he describes moonlight on a lake as “scaled roaming silver” and the reflection of the moon itself “packed and coiled in a reservoir,” images of uncanny lyrical exactness.