SOURCE: Hill, Robert W. “James Dickey: Comic Poet.” In James Dickey: The Expansive Imagination, edited by Richard J. Calhoun, pp. 143-55. DeLand, FL: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1973.

In the following essay, Hill highlights Dickey's comic poetic vision, even as it frequently manifests amidst tragic circumstances.

Sometimes James Dickey talks too much, as in “May Day Sermon” or “Looking for the Buckhead Boys,” but this fault comes directly out of what is good in him. For Dickey, life is moving and absolutely uncapturable; stasis is tragedy. One thinks of the copius and flowing Falstaff, whose life goes on forever in the power of effusive relationships; and when his love is abruptly fronted by rigid confinement of it, he dies, tragically. The comic Wife of Bath is pathetic in her declining years, but the going on, her pilgrimaging and wiving forever, is comic. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye says that...