Complete Poems of James Dickey

James Dickey (1923–1997) is one of the great American poets of the twentieth century. After working in the advertising industry and teaching at several colleges and universities, Dickey received a National Book Award for Buckdancer's Choice in 1966 and served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, a position that later became poet laureate, from 1966 to 1968. He then joined the University of South Carolina English faculty and served as poet in residence until his death. He became a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1972 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1987.Ward Briggs is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics Emeritus and Louis Fry Scudder Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, USA. He has published widely on the history of American classical scholarship, the career of the classicist Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, and the classical tradition. He was a friend of James Dickey for more than thirty years.

What this weighty Complete Poems convincingly shows is that Dickey's writing was always as much fictional as confessional, making emotive impact by rhetorical means, like the advertising copywriter he also was.James Dickey claimed: "What I want to do most as a poet is to charge the world with vitality". Despite what Richard Howard has called his "conflicted sporot", and self-mythologizing - or because of it - this definitive edition proves that he succeeded.Jules Smith - TLS