Complete Poems of James Dickey

The definitive collection of works by a quintessential twentieth-century American poet

The Complete Poems of James Dickey is an authoritative edition of all 331 poems published by one of America's most distinguished poets, collected in one volume for the first time. Dickey's most-admired and most-anthologized poems―such as "The Performance," "Cherrylog Road," "The Firebombing," "Falling," and "May Day Sermon"―along with his epic poem The Zodiac are placed in chronological order of publication, affording a poetic autobiography that reveals the intellectual development and the constant experimentation of an iconic American literary figure.

This collection includes 93 poems Dickey did not publish in The Whole Motion (1992), 238 poems that he collected as an overview of his whole career. The Complete Poems of James Dickey also includes an apparatus listing publication data and textual variants for the poems, as well as explanatory notes placing Dickey's poetry in biographical and historical context. Edited with an introduction by Ward Briggs, this authoritative and complete edition will be the definitive primary source for Dickey's poetry.

This collection includes a foreword by poet Richard Howard, president of the PEN American Center and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 1969 collection, Untitled Subjects.

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. 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.