SOURCE: Lieberman, Laurence. “Notes on James Dickey's Style.” In James Dickey: The Expansive Imagination, edited by Richard J. Calhoun, pp. 195-201. DeLand, FL: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1973.

In the following essay, originally published in 1968, Lieberman presents commentary on Dickey's innovative and varied use of poetic symbolism and form.

In The Suspect in Poetry, a first collection of James Dickey's criticism, he eliminates from his canon of taste, one by one, those writers of reputation he finds suspect. Similarly, the development of his art, from book to book, is a conscious stripping away of those techniques of style and mental strategies which have grown suspect after repeated use. In the poems themselves he may leave the explicit record of steps in a willed metamorphosis of style; moreover, each conversion of manner bolsters a corresponding conversion of imagination.

To begin, Dickey's handling of figurative language suggests a basic distrust of the...