William Dickey was born in Bellingham, Washington, and grew up in Washington and Oregon. He graduated from Reed College in 1951 where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and wrote a novel as a bachelor's thesis. As a Woodrow Wilson fellow, he went on to Harvard where he received an M.A. in 1955 and to the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa for the M.F.A. the next year. He was a Fulbright scholar at Jesus College of Oxford University in 1959 and 1960. He has taught at Cornell University, Denison University, and the University of Hawaii, and he is currently a professor of literature and creative writing at San Francisco State College.

Dickey's talent was recognized early when his first collection, Of the Festivity, was chosen to be published as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1959. W.H. Auden's foreword to the book offers...