Am I the only poetry lover who thinks that James Dickey is tremendously overrated as a poet? I realize that the standards for judging greatness in poetry are vague and complicated by the lack of any generally agreed upon poetic theory in our day and age, but some poets seem to emerge - either buoyed up by developing a loyal following of readers or held up by academic attention. I have to believe that Dickey is one of those whose prominence was based on academic attention - for whatever reason - and not on on a real readership. I have never known anyone who read poetry to voluntarily turn to Dickey's work when they needed a poetry fix. His poems seem selfconscious, too aware of their images, too quick to use a word because of some association that the average reader could not possibly know. To me, they always seemed in bad faith, as if the 'poet' had developed a personal checklist of what he should include in each of his poems and how he would go about being 'poetic'. Most important, I feel that these poems are bloodless. I don't sense real passion in them.

I can spend pleasant time with Wallace Stevens and with Russell Edson, two poets as different from one another as can be, even when I have no idea what they are saying - because I at least always have the sense they are trying to say something important. With Dickey, I frequently have no idea what he is saying and worse, feel that he doesn't either, beyond the message, 'see, I've written a poem.'