SIGNIFICANCE: James Dickey achieved lame with the release of the movie based on his novel Deliverance, a violent story about four men on a weekend canoe trip. Literary scholars, however, recog nize him as one of the major poets of the second half of the twen- tieth century. Dickey's early verse, wriuen after he served with the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War ll, established the image of an exponent of bold, primitive, even violent masculinity His poetry seeks to reconnect the contemporary man, through imaginative el fort, to an imagined dimension where mind, body, and instincts are still unified. Dickey olten treats this dimension as an ill-remem bered or unclearly perceived stage in the past, one whose recovery would make life richer