James Dickey
James Dickey
James Lafayette Dickeywas an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966. He also received the Order of the South award. Dickey was also a novelist, known for Deliverancewhich was adapted into an acclaimed film of the same name...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth2 February 1923
CityAtlanta, GA
self creative persons
There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.
world kind possession
Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.
guilt sometimes feels
To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.
art lying nerves
I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us see the truth.
beautiful
Find something only you can say
reckless precise
To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.
unique literature mixtures
The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.
frost pieces toilets
If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular piece of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes.
couple writing trying
It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless drafts, one after another; and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations on a single line sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore. I get maybe a couple of nu ggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is tough for me. No, I am not inspired.
feelings mind peculiar
Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.
moon views rivers
What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.
believe praise criticize
I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.
rain poetry lightning
A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
writing realizing love-poetry
What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe