Jane Hill

Department of English and Philosophy

State University of West Georgia

Carrollton, GA 30118

Relinquishing Power and Light: Dickey's Legacy

and the Woman Question

[This essay delivered at South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, 6 November 1998.]

Mine is a difficult subject. James Dickey's representation of females and their experience reveals the deep ambiguities that define Dickey criticism. We have those critics who search for the inevitable violations of political correctness. We also have critics who read Dickey without noticing the expression of social or cultural values that makes the first group so adamant. If this second sort of Dickey critic does notice the (to some) questionable values, the critical task becomes a strained logical and rhetorical dance to make those values admirable rather than lamentable. Thus, I write, a line from Robert Peters's review of The Strength of Fields echoing in my mind: "I hope to explore this matter in some detail, realizing that to fuss about Dickey at all will undoubtedly resurrect a host of confederate troops, supported by University of South Carolina cheerleaders, to march out here and lay waste my . . . gardens, fields, domicile, books, and life" (37).

I want to apply Jack Stillinger's definition of the transcendent experience in Romantic poetry to Dickey. Stillinger says that the transcendent figure begins in reality and through some experience or experiences ascends to an elevated state from which he enjoys heightened perceptions of the real world from which he has come. According to Stillinger, however, this state cannot be maintained. The transcendent figure must re-enter the real world, but the reality to which he returns is transformed by the memory of transcendence that he brings with him (2-3). In paraphrasing, I retain Stillinger's gender-specific language (written thirty years ago) because, for both the British romantics about whom he writes and James Dickey, the transcendent figure is most likely male. A question central to my topic, however, is if and how females participate in the essential Dickey experience of transcendence.

The short answer is yes: women do participate. The longer answer, how they participate, is more complicated. Often, the woman is a tool or a vehicle used to facilitate male transcendence. When a woman is presented as the central transcendent figure, as in "Falling," Dickey's decisions about point of view and technique often suggest that the female transcendence being represented is actually a male fantasy regarding female experience. Even in a poem such as "May Day Sermon," with its speaker as well as its protagonist female, the powers attained by the transcendent figure cannot be separated from the dangers (and even inevitable destruction) that acquisition of such power entails. Dickey himself has defined the transcendent experience, exclusive of possible gender distinctions, as embodying "an element of danger, an element of repose, and an element of joy," and he goes on to suggest that the most successful renderings obscure, for the reader, the boundaries that separate those elements (Babel 292). But by casting "May Day Sermon" as a sermon, Dickey seems to underscore a cautionary tone, to warn the fictive female listeners, through his female speaker, about exactly what lies ahead--including, if not accentuating, danger--should they heed the advice to seek transcendence.

If we can grant the possibility that "May Day Sermon" emphasizes danger over repose and joy at least in part because of its distinctly gendered nature, we can see that females, though admitted to the transcendent experience, come as helpers--either literal (the nurse in "Mercy," for example) or imaginary (the stewardess in "Falling"), or they come as potential participants being encouraged, tempted, but also cautioned. And perhaps an unspoken question behind that caution is "Are you man enough for what will happen if you choose the path I'm marking?"

Such stipulative inclusion in a writer's central trope might reasonably generate responses such as Carolyn Heilbrun's attack on Deliverance, which calls "Dickey's . . . achievement . . . one more version . . . of . . . the woman-despising American dream" (Critical Essays 59). Robert Bly, another of Dickey's attackers, argues that "The subject of the poems [in Buckdancer's Choice] is power, and the tone of the book is gloating--a gloating about power over others" (Critical Essays 33). My gardens, fields, domicile, etc., at risk, I nonetheless ask that we consider, only momentarily, the implications of this particular power dynamic--a poetic voice that gloats about power over others--not in terms of Bly's reading of "The Firebombing," which, like those in the other "camp," I see as a misreading, but in terms of gender and, more specifically, in terms of gender and transcendence.

Richard J. Calhoun and Robert W. Hill say that "Philosophically, Dickey aspires to unrestrained access to all things natural, including (perhaps especially) sexuality. As it turns out, many of his sexual poems are about hunting, as well" (69). Thus, Calhoun and Hill suggest, under the subheading "Sexuality: Joy, Threat, the Twistings of Desire," that for Dickey the "natural" dynamic of sex is one of hunter and prey. Within that dynamic, gender roles, though unmentioned, are clear. In discussing "Cherrylog Road," a poem they see as comic, Calhoun and Hill connect the Dickey concept of "Gigantic forepleasure" (a phrase from "Adultery") to the rhetorical decision to delay Doris Holbrook's entry until the reader is "two-thirds through the poem" (69). Endorsing this strategy, Calhoun and Hill conclude that in "Cherrylog Road" Dickey renders a "powerful . . . union" (69). I would add that in the poem's memorable last line, "Wild to be wreckage forever" (Poems 137), Dickey also achieves the transcendence he seeks to represent. The images of power are, however, here associated primarily with the male, who wrings the handlebars of his motorcycle and speeds away, high on the elements of danger, repose, and joy inherent in the sexual encounter just completed.

The poem omits consequences for the other character, Doris Holbrook, who must presumably return to the father who might kill them. Joyce M. Pair has correctly linked the portrait of illicit young lovers and angry father in this "comic" poem to the representation of these same figures in "May Day Sermon" (Critical Essays 146), where the results are not comic. Thus, whether she has experienced sexual transcendence as the narrator has or has merely served as its vehicle, Doris Holbrook faces possible abuse--verbal and physical--at the hands of her father. Yet this potential danger is not the poem's concern. Nor need it be. For "Cherrylog Road" is a great poem without analyzing what happens to Doris Holbrook after the romantic interlude.

The issue, for me, is how the critic's concerns do and should differ from the poet's. Had Dickey asked the questions I'm asking about his portrayal of Doris Holbrook, I suspect he would have produced a less great poem, but I wonder about the now decades-long parade of critics who refuse to ask such questions or who see them as immaterial. What is beyond the boundaries of the poet's responsibility is not necessarily beyond the critic's. I think critics are obliged to ponder Doris Holbrook's (unwritten) potential fate before we conclude anything about Dickey, transcendence, sex, a comic tone, and so on. Such questions, introduced to the discourse of criticism by schools other than New Criticism, cannot finally undo a text's merits as established by New Critical tools. They can expand the parameters of discourse, and allowing such expansion would be a way to anticipate naysayers such as Bly, who attacks the disingenuousness of New Critical methods, especially the concept of the persona, which, for him, allows critics to avoid what he sees as obvious ideological/political/social issues in poems (Critical Essays 37). If those who find "Cherrylog Road" a great poem (or even a good or an acceptable poem) would ask these questions and answer them on their own terms, Bly would lose a major foundation of his attack, and those who admire Dickey's work would set the terms of the broader debate regarding the poet's cultural ethic. I think critics don't ask these questions at least in part because the poem is such a great poem. Dickey successfully draws them, as readers, into the point of view of his narrator/persona, and they leave the poem imaginatively connected to the young man on the motorcycle, who is no more concerned with Doris's potential fate than is his creator or his critics.

The particular nexus of poet, text (including characters), and reader (including critics) that I am examining here involves a fairly straightforward power hierarchy. Doris Holbrook remains at the mercy of male power, whether in the form of repressive patriarch or passionate lover, in that she must service the lover only to be abandoned to the father. While the image of the vindictive father does appear to heighten the narrator's experience and thus place him too in a subservient role in relation to the (necessary?) stimulus figure, the narrator's relationship with that figure remains imaginative while Doris's is inescapably real. At the next level in the power hierarchy, the text itself--generated from the fictive lives of these two characters but by its form alone delimiting them--exerts a power over the reader/critic, encouraging him/her to experience the events as the narrator experiences them, thereby further authenticating his power as superior to his female counterpart's and laying the foundation for the eventual, almost inevitable assumption that the narrator's perspective is merely a façade for what the poet himself thinks about the events being recorded. The effect, then, of the poetic persona is remarkably similar to what Bly suggests. The narrator positions us to agree with him, and from that carefully maneuvered space we naturally (and certainly Dickey would want us to see this movement as natural) gravitate toward the conclusion that the poet, the real power figure in my scheme, has revealed something true, something profound, and, thus, something somehow "right" about human experience. We have transcended the questions that would position us elsewhere--that is, closer to reality as we know it--and have taken the trip the poet wishes. What I suggest here in a curious inversion of one of Dickey's best images of transcendence. In Deliverance he describes "the triumph of an illusion when events bear it out" (230); in "Cherrylog Road" (and in most of his truly great poems about transcendence) Dickey moves his readers toward a triumph of events when illusion bears them out. As the creator of that illusion, the poet naturally assumes the top position in the power hierarchy.

And thus the mighty task of an ambitious critic becomes, in part, questioning this hierarchy, wondering if the lives represented--the representatives of reality--in this scheme, who reside--through the poet's work done well--at the bottom don't deserve the dignity of our exploring other possible configurations of power. That exploration cannot lead to displacement of the poet because, in the simplest terms, the poem is the poem is the poem. Nor can a critic's exploration ever have the rhetorical power of the poem, and thus the critic remains unlikely to create a text "superior" to the poet's. What the critic might accomplish has more to do with the reader/previous critic than with anything else in the configuration. We might see the exploring critic as a character in a power struggle with the poet (and/or other critics) for the minds of future readers. Through such a struggle, which in the reality of literary criticism is the ongoing critical debate over an author's work, readers might become more sensitive to the realities that lie behind poetic representation. This might be a good thing, as Martha Stewart would say.

Dickey has not been without such critics. Reviewing Into the Stone, Dickey's first book, James Wright points out "a kind of courageous tenderness" (Critical Essays 30) in the work, suggesting that the poet himself is not immune to the sorts of questions that I want critics to raise. Wright goes on to add parenthetically that Dickey's characters contain an essential "realism": "(there is no vague 'Humanity' . . . there are only particular men and women and children, often named and always deeply felt in their solid physical being)" (Critical Essays 30). Wendell Berry, reviewing Helmets, cites Dickey's sympathy for his characters, his "seeing into the life of beings other than the poet," as central to his work (31). In addition to countering charges such as Bly's assessment of "Slave Quarters" as "one of the most repulsive poems in American literature," its "tone . . . not of race prejudice, but of some incredible smugness beyond race prejudice, a serene conviction that Negroes are objects" (Critical Essays 34), assessments such as Wright's and Berry's point the way toward a critical approach that makes use of Dickey's own awareness of the cultural realities that inform his characters' back stories. Because Bly raises the issue of objectification, although in regard to race rather than gender, one might also cite Wright's insight about Dickey's "deeply felt" sense of his characters' "solid physical being" and Berry's notion of the poet's sympathy as alternatives to a pattern of objectifying the Other.

The critics who have mounted the most detailed specific discussions of Dickey's representation of female characters, Joyce M. Pair and Robert Kirschten, however, structure their arguments according to a different strategy. Both mount compelling defenses of Dickey's work on feminist grounds. In fact, Kirschten closes his Introduction to Critical Essays on James Dickey with a statement about the poet's representation of females:

While I would stop short of considering Dickey a revolutionary feminist, both Pair and Kirschten follow what Pair correctly identifies as "one strain of feminist thinking [emphasis added]" (148). That strain "views woman as life-giving goddess" and, for Pair, "has been continuous throughout [Dickey's] career" (148).

Arguing for an "anthropological/ethnological gestalt that empowers women in prepatriarchal systems of morality," Pair cites intertextual relationships between "May Day Sermon" and various anthropologists that Dickey had read and continued to teach. In balancing these anthropological models of female archetypes with the present-day realities of his specific female characters, Dickey connects, according to Pair, "woman as Earth Mother, who has fallen victim to her patriarchal role, to Eve" (136), thus merging the pagan and Judeo-Christian traditions that shape the narrative. "The woman preacher as spiritual teller," therefore, Pair suggests, "represents both ancient goddess and modern guide to young women" (135-36), and her message addresses "modern woman's need to overcome paternalistic restraints of her sexuality" (137). Pair credits the woman preacher's privileging of "women's determination to exit the patriarchal enclosure where sexuality means guilt," and she sees the preacher as positing a primitive matriarchy as a viable alternative to Christian patriarchy, especially its Appalachian version (137). Through its juxtaposing of "ancient ritual with more recent tradition, Dickey's poem," Pair says, "advocates a full and free life for women [emphasis added]" (139), the poem becoming "a fertility rite designed to restore earth and women to a 'natural' state of fruitfulness" (143), an observation Pair takes from Kirschten. In this reading, then, the preacher's message becomes a call to her female listeners "to regain their goddess role" (143).

I have quoted this essay at such length for two reasons. First, because of its extensive treatment of the "woman question," it deserves the attention. But I also want to examine a particular rhetorical decision that Pair builds into her conclusion, and I don't want to take the sentence in question entirely out of the context of her language. The sentence that concerns me is this one: "Even though Dickey's May Day goddess must die for her sexual freedom, accommodating herself to a masculinized ideology and model of the self that reinforces the conflation of sex and violence, the poem's symbolic frame suggests that freedom does exist for women . . ." (148). The specific rhetorical technique I want to examine is subordination. Notice that the subordinate clause here acknowledges a number of disturbing things about the female representation in "May Day Sermon": the woman must die for her sexual freedom; she must accommodate masculine ideology and a masculine model of the female that conflates sex and violence--that is to say that she must become an accomplice to a masculine vision. The other clause--grammatically, the main or independent clause--has some equally disturbing diction: it is only at the symbolic level that a suggestion of freedom exists for women. As a critic concerned with feminist questions, I am unable to consider the second clause as independent from the first; doing so means, grammatically and therefore ideologically, at some level, that the dependent or subordinate clause could be dropped and still the essential communication made. In addition, the relative certainty about "real-life" consequences inherent in the first clause must, in the structure of this sentence, be subordinated to a symbolic suggestion of something better. Because, as Wright suggests, Dickey is so good at making his reader feel the "reality," the concrete humanity of his characters, the trade-off here seems too much to ask--if one is trying to establish the poet as a revolutionary feminist. If one wants to grant the enormous rhetorical power of the poem without making a claim for the poet's feminist credentials, we might have a different discussion. But the claim is there, both within Pair's essay and in Kirschten's introduction. Had I written this sentence from another strain of feminist thinking, one that posits woman not as goddess but as fully human, I might have reversed the clauses, saying "Even though the poem's symbolic frame suggests that freedom does exist for women . . . , Dickey's May Day goddess must die for her sexual freedom, accommodating herself to a masculinized ideology and model of the self that reinforces the conflation of sex and violence."

Focusing on "Falling" rather than "May Day Sermon," Kirschten also pursues the strain of feminism that seeks to make human women into goddesses. Relying in part on Monroe K. Spears, Kirschten says, "In Dickey's poem, what is prophetic (and 'healing') about the stewardess's visioning powers is . . . her 'accessibility to the Dionysian powers of the 'more than human,' to 'metamorphosis and transfiguration'" (162). Kirschten's argument about the human woman's ability to transform herself, to achieve superhuman powers, includes an important link between Dickey's poetic technique in "Falling" and the female "protagonist's" goddess state. Kirschten recognizes that technique in this poem shapes female experience into what the poem's (obviously) male speaker desires. Thus, the speaker, in extremely crucial ways, becomes the protagonist of an ultimately more interesting narrative about what film theory has identified as the male gaze and male desire. This second narrative embedded within "Falling" is even more revealing if, as Pair and Kirschten suggest, we read it too in an intertextual context of established myths and archetypes. So doing can open all such female goddess figures to reinterpretation vis-à-vis their male gazers.

Clearly aware of what he calls "the erotic aspect of Dickey's poetic method" (161), Kirschten acknowledges that "Because it involves an erotic component and the death of a woman, 'Falling' has received a considerable amount of negative commentary" (168). He then goes on to deconstruct Mary Ellmann's example of such negativity. Ellmann argues that "The sensation of ['Falling'] is necrophilic: it mourns a vagina rather than a person crashing to the ground" (qtd. in Kirschten 168), a paraphrase that, for Kirschten, "does not admit of the tremendous energy of the poem or the fabulous series of powers that the stewardess acquires" (169). In fact, Dickey's genius, for Kirschten, is his "converting [emphasis added] a mortal stewardess into an earth goddess" (169), and he sees the poem as "an enabling matriarchal, creation myth" (169).

Beyond the flawed premise that mortal women are somehow insufficient, the argument is again complicated by a particular sentence constructed through subordination. Kirschten writes, "When 'Falling' is read aloud, the poem's cumulative energy is so overwhelming . . . that--although the death of the stewardess is a necessary, realistic outcome of her accident--her death has in it the feeling of a beginning" (167). Here the subordinate clause that concerns me is set off by dashes and comes in the middle of the sentence, rather than at the beginning. But the issues are basically the same as in Pair's similar sentence: the death of a mortal woman is logical in realistic terms, but that reality is subordinate to a sense of overwhelming energy that can reside in one or two places: within the poet and/or within the reader (though Dickey also represents these people in the poem itself through the image of the mysteriously aroused farmers who wander into their fields at midnight to behold the fallen goddess). The beginning that emerges from the necessity of death is a beginning for others, not for the mortal woman, except through the poet's (and reader's) imagination. Again, for me, the trade-off is not enough from a realistic feminist perspective.

I certainly don't want to suggest that such goddess readings are not consistent with the poems. Dickey himself says that the stewardess ultimately feels "a kind of goddess-like invulnerability," and for him she becomes, by stripping, "clean, purely desirable, purely woman, and dies in that way" (Self-Interviews 175). In addition, other critics, such as Gordon Van Ness and Robert C. Covel, have approached Dickey's representations of the female from a similar perspective.¹ I do want to suggest that such readings--what I will call the goddess strain of feminism--have inherent in them a number of dangers and conflicting ideals, if one is concerned with how real women might live, in the real world, the fullest, most intense lives possible, which is, of course, to say how women in Dickey's poems might have access to all that men seek and often, as represented by the poet, find.

Dickey's women, as represented in the poems, do not, in general, overcome the obstacles that being female in the world as Dickey renders it presents. They do not, in general, find themselves living the fullest, most intense lives possible; they do not usually come close even to the level of pursuit of those goals that their male counterparts enjoy. These conclusions seem so obvious to me that I will not take the time fully to develop the argument through specific examples. Consider momentarily only the two female representations in "The Sheep Child": the ewe who gives birth to the grotesque narrator of the poem's second section and the women the farm boys marry, who live with those once ". . . wild to couple" (252) and with them ". . . raise their kind" (253). According to the poem, the ewe's function, once she's seized from behind, is to give, ". . . not lifting her head / Out of dew, without ever looking, her best / Self to that great need . . ." (Poems 253). Having given herself to male need, the ewe then must, according to the sheep child, begin to do ". . . as she must do, / To carry me . . ." (253) and eventually to provide the child's ". . . one meal / Of milk . . ." (253). Although spectacularly allegorical, this representation of the female fits standard portraits: unquestioning service to male needs, patient childbearing, generous sustenance. The woman accepts her role as woman, along with its male-generated burdens. The function of the barely developed (probably because they are such a familiar type) wives that the farm boys marry is apparently to keep the boys-turned-men in line so that "their kind" can be perpetuated, making of the female a sort of mother/security guard.

Though a tragic figure, the sheep child does enjoy the perpetual transcendence that Dickey males aspire to, and without the strain of reconnecting to the real world that Stillinger identifies. Laurence Lieberman has identified that reconnection with reality after a transcendent experience as the chief problem in Dickey's work (65-66). By making transcendence and thus the problem of reconnecting an almost exclusively male concern, Dickey might perceive the controlled or denied transcendence of female characters as a "gift," a protection that saves women the pain and trouble that males experience. But the concomitant female dilemma is only slightly exaggerated by my references to the female figures in "The Sheep Child." Women are to stand and serve without question and to be grateful that they don't have to worry with all that stuff men must deal with.

Even when Dickey tries to make transcendence something a man and a woman share, his poetic genius usually takes him back to his original understanding, and transcendence is not revised according to a cultural notion of equality. The joint experience of sex is central to the transcendence in "Mercy." The male who goes to pick up the nurse for a date clearly needs her help. He sees hers as a house of mercy in the midst of nights in which "mortality wails out" (14). He must wait for Fay, the nurse (note that she is named, made a specific human person, as Wright suggests is typical of Dickey, but the male narrator is left unnamed, an archetype of maleness and male need), before he can begin his assault on the limits of mortality. When she finally arrives, he senses that the patient she has just left has died. Real mortality collides with his imaginings. His first thought is that there must be some way "outside of time" that she can "strip Blood off" (15), remove the traces of mortality. But at the same time he seeks to connect with her-- ". . . O take me into / Your black . . ." (15), he resists total connection by asking that she restrict the union: ". . . Without caring, care / For me . . ." (15). And despite his apparent fear of his own mortality, as they make love, it is the permanence of death about which he obsesses. His vision of the nurse as the ". . . queen of death / Alive and with me at the end" (Eyebeaters 16) relies, of course, on the idea of sexual climax as death. In this metaphor, one can see the paradoxical nature of the relationship between the transcendent figure and the person or persons he must use to achieve his goal. The man, with the nurses's help, reaches climax, which is the end--death. At first, this may seem contrary to what appeared to be his goal--transcending his own mortality. But because this death through sex is temporary, one from which he not only can but also must return, it becomes a death in which one does triumph over mortality. Thus, the connection with the nurse serves to satisfy his need. She, on the other hand, is left alive at the end, which translates in the sexual metaphor to untranscendent. Even though he needs her to facilitate his ascension, he does not, perhaps cannot, allow her to ascend with him.

Dickey did not originally plan for "Mercy" to end with the separation of transcendent figure and vehicle. His notes in manuscript reveal that he intended the couple to enjoy joint transcendence--"A decent death. We [emphasis added] sink down." The additional notation "Fay comes" indicates that their sexual fulfillment was to have been shared. An early outline says, "This should be a kind of parable of sex being based, essentially, on death: [the nurses in Mercy Manor] know death every day, and they come in hot for life and love." From this original intention to focus on Fay's need for life and love, Dickey does a complete turn-around to emphasize the man's need. The last point of the outline suggests again that their needs are both to be considered and satisfied in the poem: "We sink back We are both where we want / To be have to be want to be." But Dickey abandons this plan. Successfully carrying one figure to transcendence is a difficult enough poetic task, and the poet's interest here ultimately settled on the male persona (Dickey papers).

The image that marks femaleness in "Mercy" is blood. The images that define male transcendence might be taken from the title of a single Dickey poem, "Power and Light." Thus, only when Dickey can allow a female character to overcome the limitations of her association with blood and to assume the male signs of power and light can he begin to explore what female transcendence in the Dickey model might be. In "Power and Light," of course, the female has a very different role: she is the obstacle to male transcendence, the sign of conventional suburban life that must be bypassed en route to the basement, where the male protagonist can, with alcohol as his vehicle, connect, only connect, to the power and light that will make him a man. But in Puella, his book of a girlhood male-imagined, Dickey does finally acknowledge that females do desire and create access to the same transcendent transformations as their male counterparts. In section II of "Deborah as Scion," Dickey writes:

And we can hold, woman on woman

This dusk if no other

and we will now, all of us combining,

Open one hand.

Blood into light

Is possible:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In the one depth

Without levels, deepening for us. (34)

In addition to the direct transfer of blood into light that is articulated here, Dickey suggests with the closing image of one depth, without levels, that perpetually deepens itself for the plural "us," a collapsing of the hierarchy of power that dominates a poem such as "Cherrylog Road." Although the most obvious antecedent of this us is the female ancestors about whom Deborah is thinking in the poem, within the context of the book's effort by a male to imagine a girlhood, I don't think it is too great a stretch to expand the us to include as well the poet behind the first-person female persona. He, too, enters the one depth without levels, as might the reader-critic as well. It is in this democratic imagery, itself a transformation of the old Dickey hierarchy, that I see the best possibility for a genuinely feminist element in the Dickey legacy.

In "Springhouse, Menses, Held Apple, House and Beyond," Dickey provides one of what William Harmon calls "those helpful titles (against the grain of the age, which seems to favor . . . nothing-title poets . . .)" (Struggling 47), but I see this particular title as more than helpful. We might, in it alone, read the evolving "feminist" perspective in Dickey's work. The springhouse, in addition to being a sanctuary associated with purity and so forth, might have been used in an earlier Dickey poem much as the junkyard and the abandoned automobile are used in "Cherrylog Road," as a likely site for a secret assignation by illicit lovers. Here, however, it is the woman alone who visits the springhouse on the occasion of her first menstrual period, which, in the old Dickey scheme, would mark her for the limited role of woman allowed in the created space of that world. The next phrase in the title, "Held Apple," makes clear the connection to standard female archetypes and links this woman to Eve; "House" similarly links this woman to the woman in "Power and Light," making her the potential enemy, the obstacle, because of her associations with blood and the apple. But then there is "and Beyond," which opens out for the female all that Dickey males have always pursued and often won. For me, that "and Beyond" is roughly equivalent to a motorcycle's handlebars.

In closing this poem, Dickey's female persona says:

I help it I ride it I invent it

To death and follow down shameless with energy

From the closed river flowering,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

One life

brought to bear

On what I require [emphasis added]. (26)

Patricia Laurence has pointed out that male imaginings of the female have been standard in male-generated literature from the earliest written texts:

Laurence acknowledges that "possession" is the poet's motivation here, but she goes to say that "'lightness' is the quality that holds. 'Puellae' in various kinds of personal and cultural flight are, somehow, levitated by the quality of Dickey's writing" (Struggling 233). Here, then, Laurence's metaphor suggests, Dickey comes closer to allowing woman a power and lightness that will sustain her, rather than imposing a gravity that will ultimately destroy her, as in "Falling." Laurence also situates this accomplishment in the poet's technique and links that aesthetic strategy to Gérard Genette, who describes literature in general this way: "It breathes new life into the world, freeing it from the pressure of social meaning, which is named meaning, and therefore dead meaning, maintaining as long as possible that opening, the uncertainty of signs which allows one to breath" (qtd. in Laurence 233). This approach seems, finally, the most likely, perhaps even the only, way that James Dickey might have moved toward a feminist perspective: through poetic technique that allowed him to continue his career-long quest to transcend the boundaries of fixed social meaning. Through the distance and irony of technique (those poetic devices most lauded by the New Critics, by the way) then, Dickey arrives at feminism.

Having arrived, however, his male self cannot be completely effaced. As Laurence says,

Nor is the fully imagined female exempt from woman's duty to fulfill male need; indeed, Dickey's Deborah embraces that role in "The Surround," in which she is, according to Laurence, "no longer even human but mythically dissolved as a presence in the environment--spiritually sprinkled in nature--to surround and protect the poet, James Wright, as a beneficent spirit"(239). The difference in this male-female dynamic and that which exists in earlier Dickey poems that represent women is efficiently summarized by Laurence. The woman here "does not exist in traditional relation to man, though she is 'themed' to meet the male poet" (Struggling 240).

This effort to imagine wholly a female life, while imperfect, does, I think, work to counter Bly's early charge that Dickey's work lacks the "masculine and adult sorrow" that Bly requires to label a text "art." Instead, Bly suggests, Dickey has offered "a childish longing for ultimate power" (Critical Essays 33). In Puella Dickey moves beyond such childish longing, and we perceive in the book's tone something of the adult sorrow that would come from realizing how much one had missed by coming to this new vision so late in life and career.

Dickey's former teacher, Monroe K. Spears, sees in Puella a shift to the "domestic" and goes on to read the collection as "Dickey's reply to radical feminists, for Deborah in it is both herself and Dickey's ideal modern woman, enacting her archetypal feminine role in full mythic resonance, but not enslaved or swallowed up by it" (qtd. in Critical Essays 11). Douglas Keesey has identified his "macho persona" as the thing for which Dickey had to answer to radical feminists: "The dysfunctional male who assumes a macho persona in order to perform successfully and to survive in a harsh world is the Dickey character par excellence, the perennial focus of his life's work" (Critical Essays 202). If as Laurence and Spears and others have suggested, we might in Puella begin to see a new persona emerging, and if we begin to re-read some of the earlier work intertextually--the older Dickey commenting upon the younger in ways that will alter our sense of the younger's poems (a method suggested, again, by Jack Stillinger in Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius [23])--we, as critics, might read and write differently about this poet.

In Puella, then, we find a model of female experience that real women in the real world might follow. We find transcendence for a female without death or destruction. We find a female who can be the goddess the male needs without having the goddess role become her identity. Recognizing these things, we might have better evidence than the "oeuvre of self-interpretation" (Critical Essays 202) that Keesey cites for re-evaluating the macho persona that has been Dickey's predominant public image for decades, and we might, with Keesey, come to agree, in retrospect, that Dickey's work has included all along "a powerful critique from within of machismo" (202).

Ernest Suarez correctly places Dickey within an Emersonian tradition that privileges "individual expression over communal political action" (Critical Essays 108), but uses the castration metaphor to articulate the consequences of not seeking what he calls "the full realm of experience" (105), thereby making individual expression and that full realm the province of males. In Puella the poet himself alters that dynamic, granting a female character her own voice and her own quest for the full realm of experience. In so doing, he not only moves women into the Dickey model of transcendence but also suggests an awareness of the communal political phenomenon that we call feminism. Further, by so doing, Dickey suggests that a segregation of individual expression and communal political action, especially in a democracy, is ultimately a false and unsustainable dichotomy. I believe that Dickey, like Forrest Gump, comes to see that it is maybe both happening at the same time. I also believe that future Dickey criticism will be best served by taking a cue from Gerald Graff and teaching/criticizing the conflicts inherent in Dickey's body of work, rather than continuing to perpetuate a critical divide that ultimately denies the value of the work itself.

Works Cited

Berry, Wendell. From "James Dickey's New Book." Rev. of Helmets. In Kirschten, Critical Essays. 31-32.

Bly, Robert. "The Collapse of James Dickey." In Kirschten, Critical Essays. 33-38.

Calhoun, Richard J., and Robert W. Hill. James Dickey. New York: Twayne, 1983.

Dickey, James. Babel to Byzantium: Poet and Poetry Now. New York: Farrar, 1968. (Cited in the text as Babel.)

---. Deliverance. Boston: Houghton, 1970.

---. The Eye-beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead, and Mercy. Garden City,

Doubleday, 1970. (Cited in the text as Eyebeaters.)

---. Papers, 1954-67. Washington University Libraries. St. Louis, MO. (Cited in the text as Dickey papers.)

---. Poems 1957-1967. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1967. (Cited in the text as Poems.)

---. Puella. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982.

---. Self-Interviews. Ed. James and Barbara Reiss. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. 1970. (Cited in the text as Self-Interviews.)

Forrest Gump. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Sally Field, and Gary Sinise. Paramount, 1994.

Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize Education. New York: Norton, 1992.

Harmon, William. "Herself as the Environment." Rev. of Puella. In Kirschten, Struggling. 44-48.

Heilbrun, Carolyn. "The Masculine Wilderness of the American Novel." In Kirschten, Critical Essays. 59-60.

Keesey, Douglas. "James Dickey and the Macho Persona." In Kirschten, Critical Essays. 201-09.

Kirschten, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on James Dickey. New York: Hall, 1994. (Cited in the text as Critical Essays.)

---. "Form and Genre in James Dickey's 'Falling': The Great Goddess Gives Birth to the Earth." In Critical Essays.153-74.

---. Introduction. In Critical Essays. 1-25.

---. "Struggling for Wings": The Art of James Dickey. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1997. (Cited in the text as Struggling.)

Laurence, Patricia. "James Dickey's Puella in Flight." In Kirschten, Struggling. 232- 40.

Lieberman, Laurence. "The Worldly Mystic." In James Dickey: The Expansive Imagination. Ed. Richard J. Calhoun. Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1973. 65-76.

Pair, Joyce M. "'Dancing with God': Totemism in Dickey's 'May Day Sermon.'" In Kirschten, Critical Essays. 135-52.

Peters, Robert. "The Phenomenon of James Dickey, Currently." Rev. of The Strength of Fields. In Kirschten, Struggling. 36-43.

Stillinger, Jack. Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. New York: Oxford, 1991.

---. "Introduction: Imagination and Reality in the Odes of Keats." In Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Keats's Odes. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice, 1968.

Suarez, Ernest. "Emerson in Vietnam: James Dickey, Robert Bly, and the New Left." In Kirschten, Critical Essays. 105-22.

Wright, James. From "A Shelf of New Poets." Rev. of Into the Stone and Other Poems. In Kirschten, Critical Essays. 29-30.