Find a still root
To hold you in it.
Let flowing create
A new, inner being . . .
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 tribal creature."
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 an exuberant self-indulgence. The brashness in him comes out in his explosive literary cirticism: Milton is one of the "great stuffed goats of English literature."
Though he has been connected with various universities, he is no convinced academic. The writing of a poem, he thinks, implies a one-to-one relationship between poet and reader, and he is distrustful of group studies of poetry "where the poem is laid up on the seminar table like a dead cat for dissection, all with a great steaming-up of academic glasses."
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."
Dickeys ultimate seriousness comes through in conversation even to those who have doubts about his ideals and style. He is an easy man to like, even for academics. He has important things on his mind. To put a cap on a conversation, he said, "One part of me is a very scholarly person--I like to read long monographs on Keats's prosody--but the other part is someone who has never seen a poem before. When I really want to enter the deep part of writing, it's as though I had never read anything before. I want to write each poem as if it were my first--not only my first, but anybody's first."