SOURCE: Bidney, Martin. “Spirit-Bird, Bowshot, Water-Snake, Corpses, Cosmic Love: Reshaping the Coleridge Legacy in Dickey's Deliverance.” Papers on Language and Literature 31, no. 4 (fall 1995): 389-405.

In the following essay, Bidney underscores the relationship between Dickey's Deliverance and the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I'd like to be some sort of bird, a migratory seabird like a tern or a wandering albatross. But … I'll have to keep trying to do it, to die and fly, by words.

—James Dickey, Self-Interviews 79

“I like to work my mind, such as it is,” said James Dickey to Francis Roberts in 1968, “to see what I can get out of it and put into it. As John Livingston Lowes revealed in that wonderful book on Coleridge, The Road to Xanadu, if these things are in your mind, Lord knows what amalgams you can get out of it” (Baughman, Voiced 44). Two years later, in his 1970 novel...