'I had begun to suspect, however, that there is a poet-or a kind of poet-buried in every human being like Ariel in his tree, and that the people whom we are pleased to call poets are only those who have felt the need and contrived the means to release this spirit from its prison.'Īpplauded for their ambitious experimentation with language and syntax, Dickey's poems address humanity and violence by presenting the instincts of humans and animals as antithetical to the false safety of civilization. 'I came to poetry with no particular qualifications,' Dickey stated in Howard Nemerov's Poets on Poetry. Two of his most famous volumes of verse, Helmets (1964) and Buckdancer's Choice (1965), for which he was awarded both the Melville Cane Award and National Book Award, were published soon after.

In 1961, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent a year in Italy with his family. In 1960, Dickey's first collection, Into the Stone and Other Poems, was published, and he soon abandoned his lucrative career to devote his life to writing poetry full-time. He stayed in New York for several years before moving to Atlanta agencies. On his return he took a position with the University of Florida, though he resigned in April 1956, discouraged by the institutional nature of teaching.Īt the age of thirty-three, Dickey moved to New York City, where he was hired to write advertising copy at the prominent McCann-Ericson agency. The Air Force recalled Dickey to train officers for the Korean War. Determined to write, he pursued graduate work, first at Vanderbilt, then at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Encouraged to write more poetry, Dickey spent his senior year focusing on his craft, and eventually had a poem published in the Sewanee Review.

When he returned from the war, Dickey enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, where he studied anthropology, astronomy, philosophy, and foreign languages, as well as English literature. In between combat missions in the Pacific, he read the work of Conrad Aiken and an anthology of modern poetry by Louis Untermeyer, and developed a taste for the apocalyptic poets, including Dylan Thomas and Kenneth Patchen. In 1942, Dickey left school to enlist in the U.S. As a boy-at six feet three inches-Dickey went on to become a high school football star, eventually playing varsity at Clemson College in South Carolina. As a boy Dickey read the work of Byron, and later, a volume of Byron's poetry was the young poet's first purchase. His interest in poetry was awakened by his father, a lawyer who used to read his son famous speeches. On February 2, 1923, James Dickey was born in Buckhead, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta.

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