SOURCE: Oates, Joyce Carol. “Out of Stone, into Flesh: The Imagination of James Dickey, 1960-1970.” In The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, edited by Bruce Weigl and T. R. Hummer, pp. 64-107. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

In the following essay, Oates studies Dickey's collections from Into the Stone, to Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy, addressing his development and principal poetic themes, and highlighting Dickey's unique expression of man's instinctual savagery.

Despair and exultation Lie down together and thrash In the hot grass, no blade moving. … 

Dickey, “Turning Away”

A man cannot pay as much attention to himself as I do without living in Hell all the time. 

Dickey, Sorties

The remarkable poetic achievement of James Dickey is characterized by a restless concern with the poet's “personality” in its relationships to the worlds of nature and of experience. His work is rarely confessional...