_At his memorial service, they all said he was bigger than life. He was definitely bigger than me. For a prose-monger, I seem to have met a host of poets; James Dickey was the only one who ever clamped me in a headlock I couldn’t break.

It was a cruel introduction to genius. Dickey was my literary idol. His poetry, beginning with the publication of May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County, Georgia by a Woman Preacher Leaving the Baptist Church, broke a grad-school spell cast by T.S. Eliot and bloodless sages writing dirges in the dark, sipping weak tea, and waiting for the end.

Dickey raged up out of Georgia like an unstable air mass, a sudden storm that blows the windows open. “Class dismissed,” snarled those outlaw bikers, bullwhip Baptists, and carnivorous mammals who stalked his violent verse. When life was all possibility and poetry seemed indispensable, Poems 1957-67 was my Bible. I still own the original paperback, that thick green volume with a cherubic Dickey on the cover, in his button-down shirt and tie. Nearly every page is separated from the binding now and half of them are stained with red wine, which I know he’d appreciate.

I met the poet in 1969, in the prime of his career. I had organized a poetry contest for employees of Time, Inc. Someone at Life talked Dickey into judging the finalists and flying up to New York to grace the presentations. I was awed at the prospect of meeting him and delighted with his choices—third prize for my girlfriend and first prize to Time proofreader Susan Mitchell, who submitted a remarkable poem (she was later a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry).

Joy reigned through Dickey’s reading of Susan’s poem. I wanted these New Yorkers to hear a true poet read in the drawl they associate with George Wallace and Lester Maddox. Dickey was superb, but I noticed that his bottle of Jack Daniel’s was half empty. The whiskey was below the label when he said something sexually explicit—menacing, actually—to the prizewinner; the bottle was empty when he seized me in a headlock that all but turned out my lights.

When Dickey lost interest in killing me, I lurched free and noticed that the editors and executives had left the reception. My story gets worse, in some ways, but the gory details are generic. A lot of poetry lovers were tested by these performances. Nearly twenty years later I worked up the courage to remind him of our first encounter. The only thing Dickey could remember was Susan Mitchell’s poem.

It was Dickey who established, at least for the Southern Circuit, the notorious droit d’ecrivain—the unwritten law that for all women who attend literary events, the sexual claims of a visiting writer take precedence over any previous relationships, including marriage. He seemed honestly, innocently surprised when a woman or her escort failed to recognize his claim. At one women’s college they still tell the story of a friend of mine who narrowly escaped Dickey’s ursine advances through a ruse (“Let me run up and get a nightie, Jim.”) and left him baying dolefully beneath her dormitory window—Ciiiindy...Ciiiindy”—until the night watchmen led him away.

It goes back to the troubadours, this sexual indulgence of poets, this convention that they live by laws of their own. It’s inherently offensive, especially when it’s exploited by charlatans and bad poets.

It could only be justified by genius. James Dickey was an unruly, unreliable, impossible man. He was a shambling 220-pound dissertation on the theme “poetic license,” a true connoisseur of excess. Yet most of the people he embarrassed, frightened, or compromised managed to forgive him long before he died. Some people can’t understand Lynn Redgrave’s character in the movie Shine, when she drops an investment banker to marry pianist David Helfgott, a bizarre schizophrenic. But who with an atom of soul wouldn’t try to love a man who could play—or write—so well?

Dickey believed, to a dangerous degree, that art justified everything. There was no point in accusing him of calculation. His act was an inseparable part of his art, and like the poems it wasn’t always lovely to behold.

“They don’t make men like Jim Dickey anymore,” said the novelist Pat Conroy, one of Dickey’s eulogists. It’s obvious that this is true, not half so obvious why it’s true. Dickey was a sensual, willful man who had close brushes with death when he was very young, flying combat missions with the 418th Night Fighter Squadron in the Pacific. Defining himself as a survivor, he committed his life to a relentless, sometimes reckless pursuit of unmediated experience.

More often and more skillfully than any other poet, he answered the question, “What does it feel like?” What does it feel like to be a living creature in its skin—in pain, in ecstasy, in terror, in a state of grace?” He entered the skins of animals so convincingly; it’s a nice conceit to imagine that he’s gone, by choice, to “The Heaven of Animals” he created:

For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done,
But with claws and teeth grown perfect

As the earthbound understand it, the poetic imagination comes with wings; only Dickey’s came equipped with talons, too. In a fallen world where our worst instinct, our herd instinct, is reinforced and manipulated to make consumers and networkers of us all, Dickey followed more ancient instincts. He was a solitary predator—a big cat consumed with curiosity—who made up his own menu as he went along.

It was an impressive menu, unless you were on it. A member of Dickey’s family thanked Pat Conroy for glossing over the poet’s legendary “appetites.” But without the appetites, could we have had the poems? As Dickey himself wrote, in the stunning, bravura “For the Last Wolverine”—

How much the timid poem needs
The mindless explosion of your rage
The glutton’s internal fire...

James Dickey ate more than his share and never apologized. He was no respecter of persons, of marriage vows, of middle-class morals. He was a harsh and brilliant critic whose humility and charity often failed him. No one should be ashamed of failing to like him—only for failing to appreciate what he could do.

A great poet is defined by his antagonists; Dickey collected his enemies as judiciously as he chose his words. Poetry attracts more than its share of Prufrocks, head-dwellers uncomfortable in their skin, city mice petrified of poison ivy and insects. Naturally they detested Dickey, the doubly blessed, who lived so intensely in his skin as well as in his head. Naturally they begrudged him his laurels.

It’s fitting that his nemesis was Robert Bly, of Iron John fame, who for years has earned a living teaching America’s Prufrocks how to reach the Wild Man inside themselves. What a priceless irony, Bly’s housebroken males struggling to locate their Wild Men while Dickey received delegations beseeching him to keep his own Wild Man chained in the basement.

Bly called him “a huge blubbery poet,” a wide miss on all counts to anyone who read Dickey, or wrestled him. Bly isn’t always such a fool. But he was no match for James Dickey, neither on the page nor arm-wrestling bard to bard, a showdown Dickey would have given his last caesura to arrange.

Dickey disliked Eliot, dismissed the Beat poets as clowns, and disparaged “the school of Gabby Agony” epitomized by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. To the frustration of his friends and partisans, he backed down from a fight about as readily as his wolverine, and he paid the price.

Between the animus of the poetry establishment, the literary world’s generic condescension to Southerners, and the incomprehension of ponderous philistines like Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post, Dickey usually found himself paddling upstream. Fortunately he relished such uncloistered, high-visibility assignments as the space program (he was the first “poet of space”), the Jimmy Carter inauguration, and the Hollywood film of his novel Deliverance.

They made him a famous man. Yet American poetry did not thrive, or hold its own, in his time. He may be the last poet honored with a six-column obituary in The New York Times.

“The world doesn’t esteem us very much,” he told his last class at the University of South Carolina, “but we are masters of a superior secret.”

The handful of poets at the memorial service in Columbia acknowledged the full irony in the last line of “For the Last Wolverine,” printed on the program:

“Lord, let me die, but not die out.”

Poetry is a small world where Dickey’s death leaves a huge hole, with no candidates to fill it. But the beauty of a great poet is that he leaves himself a thousand perfect epitaphs, embracing every possibility of death and resurrection. Here are the last lines of his last novel, To the White Sea:

I was in it, and part of it. I matched it all. And I will be everywhere in it from now on. You will be able to hear me, just like you’re hearing me now. Everywhere in it, for the first time and the last, as soon as I close my eyes.

Yes.