SOURCE: Strange, William C. “To Dream, To Remember: James Dickey's Buckdancer's Choice.” Northwest Review 7, no. 2 (fall-winter 1965-1966): 33-42.

In the following essay, Strange identifies dream and memory as the main thematic concerns of the poems comprising Buckdancer's Choice.

Dream, memory, and poem are an ancient knot in a web of tempting correspondencies: image and event, possibility and necessity, wish and commandment, future and past. At one time or another and in various measure, all of these pairs have been used to explain that tense presence which is a poem, and they are still useful, permitting one to describe handily the tendency of modern poetry as a shift from memory and its co-ordinates to dream. Of course, there are exceptions. Old Ovid seems a poet of the dream while David Jones clearly writes for us out of a remarkable memory. Still, our time is distinguished by poet-theorists such as...