James Dickey All American Poet Essay Research

James Dickey, All American Poet Essay, Research Paper

James Dickey was an American Poet whose life has been very diverse, and in his poetry that diversity is shown. He has a lifestyle that most poets do not get to experience. He has lived in many states and countries. That gives me the reason to think that his poetry resembles this life’s diversity.

James Lafayette Dickey, III was born in the town of Atlanta, Georgia on February 2, 1923. His parents were Maibelle and Eugene Dickey. He went to Ed S. Cook Elementary School and North Fulton High School as a kid, both of which are in Atlanta. He was athletic as a child. He played football and track, but his football career led him to a scholarship at the University of Clemson, in Clemson, South Carolina. But, before he went off to college he spent one year at the Darlington School in Rome, Georgia for one year in preparation for a college. He didn’t last longer than a year in Clemson though because he enlisted into the Army Air Corps.

He served in WWII as a flight radar observer and navigator. After serving in the army he went to school at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. He went there on the G. I. Bill. After graduating from Vanderbilt with a M. A. in English, he started to teach. He taught first at the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas. His time there was cut short because he was recalled to duty in Korea as flight training instructor. But as soon as he was discharged from the Corps he returned to teach again at Rice University. He taught at Rice until 1954 when he left to go to Europe on the Sewanee Review fellowship. After returning to the U.S. he joined the English Department at the University of Florida. He did not stay there long because he resigned after a dispute after he had read the poem, “The Father’s Body.”

He left Florida and made his way up to New York to work as an advertising copywriter. Not liking this job, he left it after only five years. He soon received another fellowship (Guggenheim Fellowship) which took him and his family to Europe. After returning from this fellowship he became Poet-in-Residence at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He stayed there for only a year, when he then becomes Poet-in-Residence at San Fernando Valley State College, in Northbridge, California. He returned to teaching in 1965 at University of Wisconsin, in Milwaukee. He only taught there for a year because he becomes Poet-in-Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He received a high honor that only a few poets get when he becomes Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress or Poet Laurate until 1968. He was then named Poet-in-Residence and First Carolina Professor of English, at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He was then given the honor of the induction into the 50-member American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters on May 18th, 1988. He was assigned Chair #15, previously occupied by novelist John Steinbeck. In 1994 he was hospitalized with jaundice (yellowish pigmentation of the skin, tissues, and body fluids caused by the deposition of bile pigments). In 1996 he was afflicted with fibrosis of the lungs. In 1997 he taught his last class at USC January 14. He then died January 19, 1997. In his lifetime he had received 9 awards, and has received many honors ranging from graduating Magna Cum Laude at Vanderbilt all the way to being a Poet Laurate for the United States. James was married twice; his first wife was Maxine he meet while he was attending Vanderbilt University. Then his second wife Deborah Dodson he married after Maxine died. James has two sons and a daughter. He had wrote more than 20 books, some include; ‘Poems 1947-1967’ published in 1967, ‘The Zodiac’ (1976), and ‘The Whole Motion’ (1992).

James Dickey has many poems, and there is many different reasons behind them being made. There is over 2,000 poems to be exact. “He first started writing them though when he was writing love letters to his girlfriends from the war“ (qtd. InS *censored*ey newsletter). Then he asked his mother to send him volumes of poetry of both the classic poets and the contemporary poets while he was enlisted in the army, which could have lead him to such diverse poetry. He wrote while he was teaching, while he was in Europe on his Fellowships‘, while he worked as an advertising copywriter in New York, and during his many Poet-In-Residence stays at various colleges. The diversity of his poems is shown in many ways. One way is there names, two of which are named ‘The Lifeguard‘, and a poem called “To His Children in Darkness’. He has many poems with nature or animals in their names. Some of which are called ‘Horses and Prisoners’ and ‘Springer Mountain’. Plus he has many poems with similar names like ‘Fox Blood’ and ‘Listening to Foxhounds’. Both of which have to do with fox’s not only in their name but also in the poem itself.

His poetry has a lot to do with the different time periods of his life. For example, when he was in the war, I can think that he thought up such poems as ‘The Firebombing’, ‘Them, Crying’ and ‘Fence Wire’. There’s also poems like ‘Winter Trout’, ‘In the Mountain Tent’, and ‘The Birthday Dream’ all of which written during a happy time of his life, probably during his teaching at Rice or while he was a Poet-In-Residence at a college.

Most poets’ poetry shows their mood and how their life is going at that time when they write it. I believe tha