Way back in a corner somewhere

There's this thing that's only half

Sheep like a wooly baby

Pickled in alcohol . . .

One of the finest and riskiest poems is "The Fiend," which Dickey talked about in Richard Tillinghast's English C section. This poem depicts a voyeur in action:

. . . She touches one button at her throat, and rigor mortis Slithers into his pockets, making everything there--keys, pen and secret love--stand up. . . .

The 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 unanswered question, though, is what a member of the New York City Police Department was doing reading the Partisan Review."

He continued: "It took me God's own time to write that poem. . . . I thought about the sexual thing. You can read all the sex manuals in the world, about married love, manipulation . . . you come to the conclusion that society wants you to have a certain kind of sexual life and sexual response. But that may or may not be the one that you do have. The man in "The Fiend" is a voyeur--as I say, don't knock it if you ain't tried it. I thought of the fiend as one who had come to a tacit understanding with himself that he needed this, no matter what it led to--ridicule, disgrace or even electrocution. The sex instinct is that strong."

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!"

He devotes a good deal of thought also to the possibilities of psychedelically induced works of art: "If the orgiastic moment were to result in a corresponding intensity of verbal presentation, I would be the first to use psychedelics. But experience suggests otherwise. Inspiration is momentary; after that, what Coleridge calls the 'architectonic' imagination must take over." His own experience with drugs was dissatisfying: "My own brief encounter with mescaline was very much of a withdrawal experience. . . . I like a sense of connection with other people and other things. I like to drink, of course, because of the sense of conviviality and celebration alcohol induces. . . . I don't believe lying around in a chemically induced trance is going to effect any changes for the better. As Gide said, 'Lucidity is my disease.'"

One 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.

Put on the river

Like a flecing coat,

A garment of motion,

Tremendous, immortal.