SOURCE: Meyers, Jeffrey. A review of Crux: The Letters of James Dickey, by James Dickey. New Criterion 18, no. 9 (May 2000): 69.

In the following unfavorable assessment, Meyers derides the errors in and superficial treatment of Dickey's collected letters.

Virgil's Aeneas, weeping over the frescoes that depict the fall of Troy, voices the tragic sense of life that animates all poets: “Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience.” In “Resolution and Independence,” Wordsworth describes the wrenching extremes of a poet's moods:

But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might Of joy in minds that can no further go, As high as we have mounted in delight In our dejection do we sink as low. 

James Dickey (1923-97), handsome, blond and blue-eyed, formidably energetic, large, and larger than life, scaled the heights. College athlete, air force navigator, advertising executive, guitarist, archer, hunter, teacher, performer and poet laureate, winner...