Crux: The Letters of James Dickey - Tapa dura

A treasury of personal correspondence, representing more than fifty years in the life of the poet and novelist, features letters to John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren, and many other literary notables

was a great poet, a legend of the reading circuit, and -- after the best-selling Deliverance and its celebrated movie version -- a celebrity. This rich collection, reaching from 1943 to  his death in 1997, and from a fledgling poet to an ailing man of letters, constitutes a vibrant short course in literature and poetry since World War II. From a 1959 letter: "For a long time I have been trying to do two things in poetry, both of which I have been told I should not do. The first is to get away, by whatever means, from the idea of a poem as objet d'art. . . . The other is to be able to make statements, one after the other: this happens, this happens, then this happens. To go with all this, I have also been trying to assert connections in nature where none exist: to make the world do what I say, rather than what it actually does." Matthew J. Bruccoli, James Dickey's literary personal representative, notes in his introduction: "The letters assembled in this volume re