SOURCE: "The Momentum of Word-Magic in James Dickey's The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy," in Contemporary Literature, Spring, 1995, pp. 130-63.

[In the following essay, Kirschten asserts that Dickey's The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy "constitutes one of the central transitional texts in Dickey's poeticcanon."]

In the late sixties, when he collected his first five books of poetry into one volume, James Dickey had reached such a considerable level of literary success that Louis Untermeyer claimed that Poems 1957–1967 "is the poetry book of the year, and I have little doubt that it will prove to be the outstanding collection of one man's poems to appear in this decade." While Peter Davison and James Tulip ranked Dickey and Robert Lowell as the two major poets in the country, John Simon was even more enthusiastic when he declared, "I place Dickey squarely above Lowell." However, in 1968, with...