After I published a biography of James Dickey in 2000, a photographer from a Virginia magazine asked me to come up with the one word that best summed up James Dickey’s career. He planned to take a picture of me and the word for an article about my biography. At first I resisted. How could I or anyone encapsulate Dickey’s prolific, multifaceted career in one word? The photographer, however, insisted, and I complied, although I tried to find a word that would at least do some justice to Dickey’s expansive personality and career, and that would also suggest that he could not be reduced to a single word. In the end, I wrote big on the blackboard, and the photographer took his picture.

Reading over The Complete Poems of James Dickey, edited by his friend Ward Briggs, University of South Carolina professor of classics emeritus, I was reminded of my uncomfortable session with the magazine photographer. Briggs’s book is not only big (close to 1,000 pages with the introductory material and notes), but there are numerous references to Dickey’s big ambition and personality. In the foreword, Richard Howard calls The Complete Poems “a copious, clamorous amassment” and remarks: “There is a sense (or folly) in which James Dickey grew too big for mere poetry; the energy and intensity of his powers spilled (surely the right word) into fiction, into criticism, as well as into a curious form of prose commentary packed into several volumes of self-interviews.”

Following Howard’s lead, Briggs emphasizes Dickey’s determination to spill—like a river over dams—into new territory. When the confessional style of poetry practiced by Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton was in vogue, Dickey went his own way toward something “larger, more inclusive,” and more mythical. “The main thing the poet must remember,” he is quoted as saying, was “never to be bound by facts.” In his drive toward bigger, more stimulating, and more universal forms, Dickey in the 1960s lengthened his lines until they filled the page like “a shimmering wall of words.” The fame he enjoyed after the success of his novel Deliverance and after President Jimmy Carter invited him to read a poem at an inauguration ceremony in 1977 only increased Dickey’s desire to expand into new styles and new genres. As Briggs notes, Dickey was a “larger-than-life poet” who was always determined to take on new challenges.

One of the premises of my biography was that Dickey’s large talent and large personality deserved a large biography. Briggs, who contributed [End Page ii] substantially to my understanding of Dickey’s “outsized personality,” works from a similar premise in The Complete Poems. He begins with Dickey’s first poems published in the Gadfly (a Vanderbilt student magazine) and the Sewanee Review during the late 1940s. Hundreds of pages later, he ends with Dickey’s elegy for F. Scott Fitzgerald, “poems of uncertain date,” and two children’s poems. “Christmas Shopping, 1947,” the opening poem in the collection, gives glimpses of Dickey’s remarkable craftsmanship as an undergraduate and of the obsessions that would define his career. In alliterative lines that echo Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Beowulf poet (“grave glitter of guilt and gift”), Dickey announces his opposition to the horde of shoppers who seem oblivious to the God that the Christmas holiday is supposed to commemorate. He also announces the origin of his gift as a poet. Although Briggs argues that early in Dickey’s career, “tribal ritual” led him “to seek the truths of the world by means of communion with the darker mysteries of nature,” many of Dickey’s early poems communed with wounded people and sacrificial gods who reminded him of his own wounds. Having survived thirty-eight missions as a radar observer in the 418th Night Fighter Squadron in the Pacific during World War ii, Dickey found in Christ and those who resembled Him examples of the way wounds could be redemptive. Edmund...