SOURCE: "James Dickey, Two-Fisted Poet and the Author of Deliverance, is Dead at 73," in The New York Times, January 21, 1997, p. C27.

[In the following obituary, Krebs presents a detailed review of Dickey's life and career.]

James Dickey, one of the nation's most distinguished modern poets and a critic, lecturer and teacher perhaps best known for his rugged novel Deliverance, died on Sunday in Columbia, S.C. He was 73.

He died of complications of lung disease, The Associated Press reported.

Mr. Dickey, a big, sprawling, life-loving, hard-drinking man once described as "a bare-chested bard," was a prolific poet whose work was admired for its "intense clarity," its "joyous imagination" and its "courageous tenderness."

His poems often sang the praises of fighter pilots, football players and backwoods Southerners, but, as one critic put it, they were also "deceptively simple metaphysical poems that search the lakes and trees and workday fragments...