James Dickey, Two-Fisted Poet and the Author of 'Deliverance,' Is Dead at 73 (original) (raw)
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- Jan. 21, 1997
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January 21, 1997
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James Dickey, one of the nation's most distinguished modern poets and a critic, lecturer and teacher perhaps best known for his rugged novel ''Deliverance,'' died on Sunday in Columbia, S.C. He was 73.
He died of complications of lung disease, The Associated Press reported.
Mr. Dickey, a big, sprawling, life-loving, hard-drinking man once described as ''a bare-chested bard,'' was a prolific poet whose work was admired for its ''intense clarity,'' its ''joyous imagination'' and its ''courageous tenderness.''
His poems often sang the praises of fighter pilots, football players and backwoods Southerners, but, as one critic put it, they were also ''deceptively simple metaphysical poems that search the lakes and trees and workday fragments of his experience for a clue to the meaning of existence.''
Verses Constructed From Plain English
In addition to books of essays and what he called self-interviews, Mr. Dickey turned out some 20 volumes of poetry, many of them vividly muscular and passionate, almost always composed in a solidly purposeful English. He avoided the affected, and he celebrated the ordinary along with the sublime. His collection ''Buckdancer's Choice'' received the National Book Award for poetry in 1966.
There were few subjects Mr. Dickey would not tackle. In 1966, for example, he covered the launching of the Apollo 7 spacecraft for Life magazine and, while other journalists concentrated on the blastoff's scientific implications, he stressed the human drama:
as they plunge with all of us -- up from the
flame-trench, up from the Launch Umbilical Tower,
up from the elk and the butterfly, up from
the meadows and rivers and mountains and the beds
of wives into the universal cavern, into the
mathematical abyss, to find us -- and return,
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