SOURCE: "Spirit-Bird, Bowshot, Water-Snake, Corpses, Cosmic Love: Reshaping the Coleridge Legacy in Dickey's Deliverance," in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4, Fall, 1995, pp. 389-405.

[In the following essay, Bidney traces the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writing in Dickey's Deliverance.]

"I like to work my mind, such as it is," said James Dickey to Francis Roberts in 1968, "to see what I can get out of it and put into it. As John Livingston Lowes revealed in that wonderful book on Coleridge, The Road to Xanadu, if these things are in your mind, Lord knows what amalgams you can get out of it." Two years later, in his 1970 novel Deliverance, Dickey demonstrated his capacity to produce not only a visionary "amalgam" of the sort he found laid out in Lowes but, more surprisingly, a richly suggestive pattern of allusions to the work of Coleridge himself. In what follows...