The Heaven of Animals

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The Heaven of Animals

James Dickey 1962

“The Heaven of Animals” was published in James Dickey’s 1962 collection, Drowning With Others, and was later reprinted in the more widely distributed Poems 1957-1967. It is one of Dickey’s most popular and anthologized poems. In the poem, the discrepancy between a violent life and a blissful afterlife is settled. Animals, which kill because it is their instinctive nature and not because of evil intentions, find that they are not only allowed to kill in heaven but that they are encouraged to do so, with “claws and teeth grown perfect.” This poem is more than simply a justification of the place of violence in the natural order, although Dickey’s sympathies with the predatory species are obvious. The tranquility of the heaven presented here stems from the way that the victimized animals are at peace with the role they are given to play in the social order. Most literary works in Western culture show death as something to be mourned and feared, but the animals in this poem accept death in peace, glad to know their place on the grand order and to be free of the burden of finding themselves. “The Heaven of Animals” is unique among James Dickey’s poems because of the way that predators and prey are at harmony with each other. Dickey was a bow-and-arrow hunter who made a point of building up his macho image to the public, as well as to himself, and most of his poems reveal an underlying discomfort about the relationship between hunter and prey.

Author Biography

It is a mark of our culture that James Dickey’s most notable achievements were in poetry, but that he received his greatest fame for his one novel, Deliverance (1970), and that the celebrity he gained from that book shaded the public’s reaction to everything he did for the rest of his life. Even more ironic is the fact that he would not even be generally recognized for the novel had it not been for the successful 1972 film based on it, for which Dickey wrote the script. He was a versatile man who had interests and accomplishments in a number of fields. He was a novelist and critic, a movie and television writer; and a successful advertising writer who wrote copy for Coca-Cola® and Lay’s® potato chips; he was a hunter and outdoorsman who could spin great yarns, and, after Deliverance made him famous, he was a frequent and welcomed guest on television talk shows; he tried his hand at acting, playing the Southern sheriff in the movie adaptation of his book; and he was an intellectual whose essays commanded the respect of his peers. At the center of all of this, though, he always saw himself as a poet.

Dickey, who was born in 1923 in Atlanta, Georgia, was a product of the South (but not of the rural South that has provided the rich literary tradition of writers such as William Faulkner and John Crowe Ransom). In high school he starred on the football field. He was a bomber pilot in World War II, from 1942 to 1946. It was during his time in the air force that he started reading poetry seriously, while waiting for the librarian he was dating to get off duty. He went back to college after the war, earning his master’s degree in 1950 from Vanderbilt University, a school famous for the writers it produced—especially poets—from the 1920s through the 1950s. Dickey taught for a few months in Houston, then was recalled to the air force to fight in the Korean War. For a few years he wrote, won awards for his poetry, and taught at various schools. He quit trying to secure a full-time teaching appointment, however, after a scandal prompted him to leave the University of Florida in 1956: after reading the sexually explicit poem “The Father’s Body,” Dickey was asked to apologize to offended audience members; he refused. He then went to work for an advertising firm, but despite finding success there, he could not resign himself to writing solely for monetary gain. Dickey wrote the poem “The Heaven of Animals” while at his desk at the advertising agency, and it was published a few years later, in 1962. Throughout the 1960s,

Dickey and his family traveled, living off of money he earned from writing awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship. During this time, Dickey also served, for brief periods, as a poet-in-residence at several universities. After the publication of Deliverance in 1970, Dickey’s output of poetry dwindled. He was a colorful, popular speaker on talk shows and on college campuses, where he actively promoted the image of himself as a hard-drinking outdoors-man and a ladies’ man. He wrote a script for a television adaptation of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild in 1975. In 1977 he was chosen to read his poem “The Strength of Fields” at the inaugural celebration for President Jimmy Carter. For the rest of his life Dickey published poems, essays, interviews, and opinion pieces. He was respected, but not considered a major influence when he died in 1997.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Poem Summary

Lines 1-6

This poem opens with a quick, direct statement that introduces the animals of the title without any further explanation about who “they” are or where they are or why, leaving readers to understand all of this from the title. Critics have mentioned the fact that this vision of heaven is unusual because things change here, as opposed to visions where the situation in heaven is established and stays one way forever. This “changing” idea is more important in later stanzas, but it is introduced in the first line, with “The soft eyes open.” Throughout the poem, the speaker avoids mentioning any specific types of animals, but here (and in line 11, when the phrase is repeated) the poem focuses on particular, individual animals as they arrive in heaven. The poem itself is not specific enough, though, to give any details about the animals beyond the fact that their eyes are soft. Noteworthy in the structure of the first stanza is that the phrase in lines 2-3 is nearly, but not actually, repeated in lines 4-6. Each starts with the same first four words, but the second version rolls past the monosyllabic bluntness of “wood / It is wood” to a longer, more luxuriant phrase about eternity.

Lines 7-11

The main function of the second stanza is to explain the poem’s moral situation to readers. The situation is a paradox: if these animals have no souls, then what exactly is it that has gone to heaven upon their deaths? The statement that they have no souls does not quite fit with what the rest of the poem says. It is here to ridicule theological tradition, especially the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who wrote much about the subject and was firm in his belief that animals lack souls. Dickey wrote that he was upset with Aquinas’s position when he wrote this poem, but the poem uses that position, along with the claim that animals act on instinct alone. He also grants these animals a heaven, which would be useless if they have no soul. By repeating the phrase “The soft eyes open,” the poem implies some level of awareness on the part of the animals, because “soft” implies a degree of kindness, and “eyes open” is usually associated with the broader sense of knowing, or understanding, where one is.

Lines 12-16

The third stanza is the only stanza that is not directly about the situation of the animals, and instead is focused on letting readers know what their heaven is like. The key word in this stanza is, of course, “outdoing,” and correspondingly the main idea is to take concepts that have already been presented and to stretch them to an extreme. The use of the word “flowers” in line 12 shows Dickey’s nimble use of language in order to get as much meaning as he can from his words. Line 12 implies a field of flowers to the reader, but word “flowers” is actually used here as a verb, meaning that the landscape grows healthy and then opens up. The reason why the heaven of animals is so “desperate” to make itself an exaggerated version of their earthly habitat is unclear, other than the basic fact that it is, after all, heaven, and is therefore responsible to be great.

Lines 17-21

With the beauty and opulence of the setting established, the fourth stanza introduces a new element: blood. While earlier parts of the poem, especially stanza 3, focused on establishing the positive concepts of heaven—the ways animal heaven would differ from earth and the ways it would be the same—the fourth stanza brings the main contradiction of this idea out into the open. As the poem points out, this “could not be the place / It is, without blood.” If heaven is supposed to be a place where all of one’s desires are fulfilled, leading to perfect happiness, then there would need to be blood, because some predatory animals have no desire other than to catch and kill their prey. Heaven, or the power that rules heaven, even shows approval for their blood lust by making their tools of killing, claws and teeth, better than ever. But while the common notion of heaven includes perfect happiness, it also assumes that there would be peace. In this case the two ideas clash with one another: a predatory animal could not be happy living in peace.

Lines 22-26

This transitionary stanza starts in the middle of a statement about the predators and ends in the middle of a statement about the prey. Its main contribution is that it gives the mental state of the predators as one of surprise, as they discover their newfound heavenly skills. Here again is the concept of time passing in heaven. The animals that opened their eyes earlier in the poem discover new things about heaven here. They find themselves more deadly and more silent: this version of heaven involves taking the things of the earth and pushing them to unearthly extremes.

Lines 27-31

The joy of the predatory animals and the complacency of their prey are examined here. Joy, for the hunter, is not just a matter of finding a prey and killing it immediately. Since it likes to hunt, its pleasure is extended when the hunt is extended, and so, with the physical rules of the heaven different than the ones we know, a pounce from a tree can take years, and not seconds, to complete. Up to this point, the poem has focused on what makes animals happy and has looked at the unusual case, the animals that live to kill, assuring readers that heaven will accommodate their desires. That leaves the problem of the ones who are killed and the issue of how this could be considered a heaven for them. This stanza mentions their awareness of what is happening to them, and it uses the phrase “their reward,” but that

Media Adaptations

A video cassette titled James Dickey that is hosted by George Plimpton was released by PBS Video in 1989.
James Dickey, an audio cassette, was released by Spoken Arts, Inc. in 1985.
A reel tape titled James Dickey Reading His Poems with Comment at the University of Virginia, April 17, 1968 is available from the Library of Congress.

phrase, often used positively, is also often used ironically. At this point in the poem, Dickey is unclear about whether the animals that are hunted are allowed to participate in all heavenly privileges, or if this is just a heaven for the strong and aggressive.

Lines 32-36

By using the words “fulfilling themselves” in line 36, Dickey establishes the moral structure of this version of heaven: victimization is good for the victim, it is the thing that makes the victim’s personality complete. “Fulfillment” clearly has a more positive meaning than the words used in line 35, “acceptance” and “compliance,” which only explain how the victims behave without commenting on what is right. Saying that this is their fulfillment announces that this is right for them. Some of the misery associated with victimization is eliminated, because the negative elements of fear and pain are disavowed in this stanza. Although it still seems that the animals that are being preyed upon are not being treated to a very positive experience in heaven, the poem does imply one benefit for them: freedom from uncertainty. They may not be able to escape their fate, but, without pain or fear, that fate is not nearly as bad as it is in life. If uncertainty is taken to be one of life’s greatest miseries, then this situation does appear to be at least somewhat like heavenly bliss.

Lines 37-41

The poem’s last stanza sounds mythic, with its reference to the cycle of life alluding to a grand scheme, but the real significance of stanza 8 is to clear up the logical inconsistency in the situation that has been posed. One of the central defining truths about heaven is that it is supposed to be eternal, but it could not be so for animals that have been ripped to shreds by others’ “perfect” claws and teeth. The previous stanza explained how there could be a place in this heaven for animals that are traditionally preyed upon, and this stanza explains how they could remain there. The solution is simply that they rise up again after being “killed” and continue to rise up, over and over. If heaven for the killers would be to kill continuously, then heaven for the prey must be to be killed again and again.

Themes

Consciousness

One of the key contradictions in this poem is that it says directly that animals have no souls and no awareness of where they are when they are in heaven, but, in order for it to be heaven, the ones who are devoured are said to be aware of what is happening to them. The unevenness of their state of awareness is due to a central problem of heaven being a place of plurality, not harmony. A heaven for each individual creature would not be hard to think of. The heaven for a lion, for instance, would be a place where it could chase down and eat any antelope or zebra it wants. But how can that, at the same time, be heaven for the antelope? In the second stanza, the poem addresses this problem in the same way that philosophers and theologians have traditionally dealt with the problem of humans profiting from the deaths of other animals: by denying that animals have souls, that they know what they are doing or what is being done to them. The poem suggests, at this point, that they are unconscious—that they are acting only on instinct. The problem this raises is whether, logically, this would be heaven at all if all of its occupants were unaware of what was going on. After all, it would not be heaven if they were not happy there, and their contentment or complacency could not be called happiness if they were not conscious of it. The poem solves the problem by giving the prey the ability to rise up from the dead time after time, shaking off their death in order to fulfill their destiny. In this way, there is no cruelty in the fact that they are conscious of being hunted and they will be killed. The benefit of being aware of life is not offset by awareness of death, because death is, in this heaven, a temporary thing.

Topics for Further Study

Research the abilities of the most deadly predatory species in the world and report, with pictures and graphs, on what their capacities are. Explain what particular changes they would undergo if their hunting abilities were perfected.
Most of the world’s major religions do not support the position that animals have souls or that they are bound for an afterlife. Choose one religion and study its policy on this issue.
If you have a family pet or some other animal acquaintance, write a poem to it, explaining what heaven will be like for it.
Draw a picture showing what the hell of animals would be like. Be prepared to explain your reasoning.

Cycle of Life and Search for Self

James Dickey said in his book Self-Interviews that the idea of the “cycle of nature” came into this poem from a Walt Disney Company nature film called The African Lion. He was impressed, he said, that, while the film showed a wildebeest being ripped limb from limb by a lion, the narration, to make the grisly scene acceptable material for young audiences, explained the on-screen violence as being part of the larger cycle of one thing’s existence feeding another’s. Dickey commented that he loved this film and went to the theater to see it often. He also explained that, while it may have comforted frightened children, the “cycle of nature” explanation probably would not have been much comfort to the wildebeest. In “The Heaven of Animals,” this cycle is not followed because of biological need, as the film’s narration suggested. The animals here do not kill and eat because they need to, or because of their part in some grand design. They do it because their instincts have programmed them to behave that way. The animals that are caught and killed tremble, instinctively, even though they really have nothing to fear. Dickey retains the “cycle” idea, but this cycle is not necessary to promote life. It is more of a “cycle of identity,” with each animal playing its part in the grand scheme of things so that they can all continue being who they are. Unlike other philosophies that imagine heaven as a place where there would be no killing, or those that allow killing because it is necessary to spare lives, Dickey’s heaven allows for killing so that animals can retain their individual selves. “[T]he lion would not really be a lion,” he explains in Self-Interviews, “if, as the Bible says, the lion lies down with the lamb. It would be the form of the lion but not the spirit.”

Good and Evil

Readers are often uncomfortable with this poem, because it presents a moral situation that would be unacceptable in the heaven of humans but that seems perfectly fitting for the animal heaven. The early mention of “the soft eyes” of the animals draws readers to sympathize with them, and they are presented, as animals often are, as being innocent. They are in fact innocent, in the sense that they have no souls and can therefore do no evil. The heaven that they are sent to confirms their innocence by “outdoing,” making them more than comfortable in this new home, giving them “The richest wood, the deepest field.” Evil creatures certainly would not be rewarded like this. Having seen these animals pampered like good beings, readers are then told that they regularly kill other animals. Among humans, killing is the most forbidden, taboo act, the worst evil: moral systems may find times when killing is acceptable, such as in self-defense or in times of war, but these are specific cases that humans approach cautiously. In the heaven of animals, killing is not even said to be necessary for food. By making readers sympathize with the animals and then taking away the usual moral arguments against killing, Dickey implies questions about human behavior. For instance, how much is human behavior instinctive, like animals’? Depending on one’s beliefs about this issue (and scientists are always adding new evidence to make a clear-cut conclusion more difficult), the question of what behaviors are good and which are evil are more complicated than they might at first seem.

Style

The most interesting thing about the construction of this poem is that it follows no set pattern of poetry, while at the same time giving the feeling that there is a controlling hand organizing the words. It does this by using repetition, even though the repetition is erratic and follows no known pattern. The very nature of pattern is repetition. Many poems use some type of rhythmic pattern, with an arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables appearing and reappearing; this pattern is called the poem’s meter. Many also use some pattern of sound repetition, the most identifiable being rhymes that appear at the ends of lines. The poem is written in blank verse, which means that it follows no set rhyme scheme. In this poem, a few things happen more than once. The most obvious is the repetition of the phrase “The soft eyes open”—when it appears in the first line of the first stanza and then the last line of the second, the poem seems to be following the style called the rondeau, with this line being a refrain that will show up again throughout the poem. But it never appears in the poem again. Another pattern that seems to be on the brink of emerging can be seen in stanzas 2 and 3, which each end with two three-syllable lines: however, none of the other stanzas carry this pattern on. The last stanza uses the word “they” six times, which gives special weight to the subject, but this does not apply throughout the poem. There are some isolated pockets of sounds repeated throughout, such as the repetition of the “s” sound in stanza 5 and the “uh” sound in stanza 7, but these only hint at order without actually providing it. The most organized thing about this poem is that most of the stanza keep to a five-line limit, but even that general rule only develops after the first stanza, as if to assure the animals’ freedom in heaven before showing how each, in her or his own way, is resigned to repetition.

Historical Context

The Organization Man

When James Dickey wrote this poem, he was working at an advertising firm—in fact, as he relates in his book Self-Interviews, he wrote it at his office and took it to his secretary to type. After typing it, she asked, “What is it?” What company does it go to?” and after he explained that it was a poem, she asked, “What are we going to sell with it?” “We’re going to sell God,” he explained. By the mid-1950s, Americans had become suspicious that the corporate structure, represented by the advertising industry in particular, was a soulless giant that sucked the creativity and morality from ordinary

Compare & Contrast

1957: The Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas were published by Dr. Seuss. Seuss is the pen name of author Theodore Geisel, who was not a doctor at all. He had been writing children’s books since 1937, producing more than 40 books before his death in 1991.
Today: These two books have never been out of print and are part of the childhood memories of several generations of children around the world. Both have been adapted to best-selling CD-ROM’s, using Dr. Seuss’ original characters.
1957: In an effort to keep nine black students from attending Little Rock’s all-white Central High School, the Governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, led jeering protestors. When the Arkansas National Guard did nothing to protect the children’s safety from the governor and his mob, President Eisenhower sent in federal troops.
Today: Many Americans express resentment and fear about federal laws without realizing the role that such laws played in promoting social equality.
1957: Entrepreneur Berry Gordy invested $700 to start a new recording company, Motown Corp. The name “Motown” comes from “motor town,” a reference to the fact that the company’s home city, Detroit, was the center of automobile production in the United States.
Today: Although not the pop music juggernaut that it was in the 1960s and 1970s, the distinctive sound that Motown developed is still easily recognizable due to continuous play on radio stations around the world.
1957: The Frisbee was introduced.
Today: The Frisbee is as popular as ever as a recreational toy, and it is also used in serious sporting competitions.

people and left them well-dressed, well-groomed and empty—slaves of the system. The country was enjoying greater prosperity than it had in a generation, since the stock market crash of 1929 had triggered the Great Depression. Poverty was common during the Depression, which hit a peak of unemployment in 1932 of 15 to 17 million people jobless, and another 34 million with no income, at a time when the U. S. population was only 124 million. When World War II broke out in 1939, the economy began to grow, as America produced goods and weapons that European factories could not, because the war was being fought in Europe, and that growth expanded while America was in the war, 1941-1945. After World War II, the countries of Europe and Asia had suffered great destruction, leaving America as the world’s strongest economy. Postwar production and new management theories created a whole new level of non-producing bureaucrats—managers, vice-presidents, analysts, and efficiency experts. Through the late 1940s, the country was happy to see so many new jobs, but in the 1950s people began taking the healthy economy for granted, and a backlash developed against the office workers who held high incomes without getting dirty from work: white-collar workers, they were called, to distinguish them from the blue-collar workers who worked with their hands. Best-selling books of the 1950s examined the new class of professionals. Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel, The Man In the Gray Flannel Suit, about the discontents of the new middle-class, starts: “By the time they had lived seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, Connecticut, they both detested it.” A 1956 sociological study by William H. Whyte Jr., called The Organization Man, pointed out ways in which society was becoming less humane and more efficient, describing its subject this way: “He honestly wants to believe the tenants he extols, and if he extols them so frequently it is, perhaps, to shut out the nagging suspicion that he, too, the last defender of the faith, is no longer pure.” Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, published the following year, exposed the psychological tricks advertising used to make everyone a part of the collective way of thought. These books had tremendous influence on the culture of their time, and their titles became familiar parts of the English language. The way of life they examined was the one that Dickey was living when he wrote this poem.

The Space Race

On October 4, 1957, radio and television receivers around the world picked up a strange, unidentified beep. When the source was finally traced, the knowledge it brought greatly changed America’s perception of itself. The interference was caused by the first manmade satellite ever to be put into orbit around the earth: Sputnik I. The main significance was that Sputnik had been launched by the Soviet Union, and that it had been completely unexpected. During World War II, the Soviet Union had been America’s ally, but almost immediately after the war ended in 1945, the U.S.S.R. (which stood for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) became hostile and reclusive. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill coined the phrase “the Cold War” at a speech in Missouri in 1946 to describe the competition between the Communist countries of the world, led by the Soviets, and the Democratic countries. It was considered a “cold” war because there was never actually any battle between America and the Soviet Union, although military and economic strategies were constantly planned for a massive conflict. During the first decade of the Cold War, America was fairly confident. Not only was the United States the only country that had ever dropped an atomic bomb on an enemy, but it also had nuclear warheads ready in allied countries that could be fired on the Soviet Union, in the event of a war, and cause untold destruction. The Soviets had no such ability, and their technology was considered laughably behind. Sputnik changed this in a flash. It was the first achievement in which the Soviets had proven themselves technologically better than America. While dealing with their wounded pride, Americans also had a more practical matter to cope with: their new rocket superiority gave the Soviet Union the ability to fire Inter Continental Ballistic Missiles with nuclear warheads that could hit the United States. For the first time in the Cold War, Americans had to accept the fact that they might not be the predators, but the prey. The world, like Dickey’s poem, was seen in terms of mortal competition.

Critical Overview

James Dickey’s poetry was accepted with enthusiasm in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he first started publishing. The admiration of his peers continued on to the end of his life in 1997, although general enthusiasm for his work fell off around the time his novel Deliverance made him an international celebrity in the early 1970s. Some feel that this gain of stature represented a sharp decline in his talent as a poet—that he became too immersed in the praise and money showered upon him and then spent too much time socializing and not enough time crafting his poems with the care he had taken before. Others felt that his work had stayed the same, but that the critics had changed their attitudes toward him; they had become merciless and unsympathetic once he was more popular than poets generally are.

Early in his career, critics approached Dickey’s work with a sense of discovery, and they challenged themselves to understand him. In the Sewanee Review in 1963, poet Howard Nemerov summed up his critique of what made Dickey’s poems work (and the few things that weakened them) in this way: “About all I shall say to the reader: If you believe you care for poetry you should read these poems with a deep attention.” Three years later, in the same publication, H. L. Weatherby took an even more scientific approach to understanding Dickey. Weatherby’s essay “The Way of Exchange in James Dickey’s Poetry” looks at points in most of his poems where energy is exchanged, including in “The Heaven of Animals,” where the landscape and the animals energize each other. Weatherby’s essay on Dickey contains more theory than evaluation, although he does make a point of saying that he did not think much of the book that this poem comes from, Drowning With Others. During the mid-1960s, reviews in general followed this pattern, saying less and less about whether Dickeys poems were good and concentrating on how they accomplished what they did. Many mentioned “The Heaven of Animals” as representing the poet’s tendency to join the living with the dead, as in David C. Berry’s “Harmony With the Dead: James Dickey’s Descent Into the Underworld.” Other writers noted that this poem combines his recurring theme of life meeting death with another constant image, animals. Richard J. Calhoun and Robert W. Hill put a psychological spin on these obsessions in 1983: “Perhaps the fixed and predictable carnage of ‘The Heaven of Animals’ is one way of Dickey’s handling metaphysically based fear.” They went on to note that “as a poet, his fears in nature are most often when animals are present or are thought to be.” Those who tired of Dickey after his novel made him famous pointed out, as Herbert Leibowitz did, that his earlier poems at least were willing to take chances, but the later poems only followed along with already established patterns, just pretending to be daring and coasting along on what Leibowitz termed “sheer bravado.”

Criticism

Marion Hodge

In the following excerpt, Hodge analyzes Dickey’s seemingly contradictory idea of a natural yet imperfect heaven.

James Dickey’s message for the world may be, finally, that earth is all we have and all we will ever have of heaven. This is the meaning of “The Heaven of Animals,” a text that acts as a nexus of concerns in Poems 1957–1967. Especially prominent themes in this collection are the status of predation in animal life and the relationship between nature and culture.

The heaven in “The Heaven of Animals” … is not an ultimate place, as are traditional human heavens; rather, it is a primal place. It is not the ultimate abode of the ultimate bodily form involved in ultimate activities; it is the earth, where natural beings kill to eat and struggle to reproduce their kind. “The Heaven of Animals” does not describe what will be in some higher realm; it describes what is in our own “natural heaven.” The perfection shown in the poem is not perfection as we ordinarily think of it; it is the way instinctive beings live their lives right now in the natural world.

“The Heaven of Animals” is a metaphor for the timelessness of life on earth. It is not about the immortality of individuals but the immortality of species. If any genesis is suggested, it is the continuous “genesis” of life and generation. This is not a heaven of reverent joy, nor of potential come to fruition, nor of fulfillment after an existence of incompleteness, nor of unity after chaos, nor of wholeness after fragmentation, nor of security after threat. This heaven is not a place where negation of ego is rewarded. It is a place where the whole physical panorama of life on earth is condensed to its fundamental elements: killing and birth. In fact, Dickey’s own comments about “The Heaven of Animals” support the natural-heaven interpretation. In an interview reprinted in Night Hurdling, Dickey rejects a number of traditional ideas and says, finally, that the poem is indeed symbolic of physical life on earth.

Of initial concern to Dickey is the tendency of those who use the cycle-of-nature trope to ratio-nalize—or ignore—the suffering of individual victims. “[A]ll this talk about the cycle of nature,” Dickey says, “must be a tough thing to hear if you’re the animal that’s getting torn to pieces.” Dickey’s own trope in the poem, “the cycle’s center,” is perhaps used as a kind of moral bullseye to cause readers to zero in on individual suffering, for suffering is certainly suggested when the victims “tremble,” “fall,” and “are torn.” Still, the matter of individual suffering is made problematical in the poem by the statements that the prey “feel no fear” and are “without pain.” Why do they tremble if they feel no fear? Why do they feel no pain when they are torn apart?

Resolution of this paradox would seem to hinge upon the matter of individual identity, which is Dickey’s subsequent concern in the interview reprinted in Night Hurdling. Dickey finds “grossly unfair” the belief that “animals have no souls, and therefore they’re perishable, not like us wonderful human beings.” Interpreting “soul” as essential identity, Dickey says that a heaven of animals “wouldn’t really be a heaven if the animal was deprived of his nature. I mean the killer must still be able to kill, and the hunted should still be hunted.” Finally, Dickey summarizes his understanding of the theme when he says the poem is “some kind of mystical vision of creation.” If “creation” means “this world,” then heaven, as the poem depicts it, must consist of the “knowledge” as well as the “acceptance” of our role as both death-dealer and mortal being.

Traditional heavens are perfect because they conceive of the individual as existing in a place where, as there is no necessity to eat and thus to kill, there is neither threat nor guilt and where, except for that modification, the individual ego is maintained throughout all no-time. Traditional heavens are places of peace because individuals, no longer prey to others, experience no fear and because, no longer predators, they experience no guilt.… In contrast to such metaphors, the images in Dickey’s heaven of animals are full of action, and temporality is directly mentioned: the predators’ descent upon the prey “May take years / In a sovereign floating of joy.” Dickey’s heaven, then, from just this perspective, would not seem to contain typical paradisaical bliss.…

It is true that there is no question of good or evil in Dickey’s heaven of animals; the animals are indeed incapable of evil, and they certainly feel no remorse, but the reason is not that they have been translated into a realm that perfects their identities. The reason is that animals are not encumbered with such matters as they go about their lives of surviving—eating and avoiding being eaten—right now on earth. Animals kill without remorse because they must eat, not because they find pleasure in it. Furthermore, the argument that Dickey is ignoring the entire cycle by omitting scavengers from his heaven fails to consider that the predation is the symbol of all animal killing and eating. The predator in the poem is all predators and the prey is all prey. In nature, and so in the “heaven” of animals, a predator is also prey and an animal that is prey is also a predator.…

[T]here is no evidence that Dickey is suggesting that domination is the superior quality. The prey receive the final, emphatic attention, and in nearly half the poem, Dickey is entirely unconcerned with the predator and its prey, showing the reader animals in general and their heavenly environment:

   Here they are. The soft eyes open.
   If they have lived in a wood
   It is a wood.
   If they have lived on plains
   It is grass rolling
   Under their feet forever.

   Having no souls, they have come,
   Anyway, beyond their knowing.
   Their instincts wholly bloom
   And they rise.
   The soft eyes open.

   To match them, the landscape flowers,
   Outdoing, desperately
   Outdoing what is required:
   The richest wood,
   The deepest field.…

This passage emphasizes clearly positive qualities: softness, blooming, rising, richness, depth— not domination. It also emphasizes the importance of individual identity rather than domination; all the animals, not just the predators, get in heaven the environment that has given them their identities on earth, or, to say it as we have been saying it, the natural environment is all the heaven there is. How could it be possible otherwise, for them and for us, to maintain identity except among the places and actions that created those identities in

What Do I Read Next?

This poem was published in Dickey’s book Drowning With Others and became widely available in the collection Poems: 1957-1967, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1967 and since republished by The MacMillan Co. It has been reprinted in countless anthologies since then, and Dickey’s writings have been collected in various forms, but that volume, covering a ten-year span early in his career, provides a good look at the work Dickey was producing then.
James Dickey wrote a great quantity of nonfiction. One of his best collections of essays is Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now, published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in 1968. This volume contains short impressions and critical assessments of dozens of his contemporaries, from those now obscure (Josephine Miles) to those whose fame and importance lives on (such as W. S. Merwin). This book also includes his famous essay, “Barnstorming for Poetry,” about life on the lecture tour circuit.
The year after his death, in 1998, the poet’s son Christopher Dickey published a memoir about what it was like growing up in the shadow of a famous man. His book, Summer of Deliverance: Memoir of a Father and Son, examines the public persona of hard-drinking ladies’ man that Dickey worked hard to project and the toll it took on his family.
Admirers of James Dickey’s works will almost always end up reading his most famous publication, the novel Deliverance. The book, about a group of friends who go on a canoeing trip and have to fight for survival against a family of primitivistic mountain men, is similar to this poem in its mix of violence and philosophy about the human condition.

the first place? A setting can be heaven only if the animals can keep their instincts, which developed in a particular environment.

James Dickey may be searching for heaven on earth, as Peter Davison says [in his article “The Great Grassy World from both Sides: The Poetry of Robert Lowell and James Dickey” in James Dickey: The Expansive Imagination], but it is clear that in several moments he has found it. The purest discovery is told in “The Heaven of Animals,” but there are many other poems in which the natural heaven is found and entered.…

“For the Last Wolverine” (Poems 276–78) is Dickey’s despairing, angry eulogy for the natural heaven and the poetry that is this heaven’s voice as they are being destroyed by civilization. The poem ends with one of the most poignant pleas in the poetry of our time: “Lord, let me die but not die / Out.” Our age is the first in which people have been able to watch—and have caused—the extinction of species. Dickey’s poem is largely a dream of revenge for this murderousness; the poet imagines a terrible beast, a combined wolverine and eagle, attacking the fur trappers and road- and railroad-building crews who are threatening the environment, the implication being that the incursion of civilization into the wolverine’s habitat is the animal’s curse and doom. Furthermore, since the wolverine is made a symbol of the “wildness of poetry,” civilization is seen as the imagination’s curse and doom as well, eliminating what “the timid poem needs,” and so what timid modern life needs: the “mindless explosion” of “rage.” The wolverine’s doom is the doom of the natural heaven: “Lord, we have come to the end / Of this kind of vision of heaven.” The earth is no longer heaven but, instead, deadening, destructive civilization.

Before the wolverine-eagle takes its revenge, the speaker imagines the wolverine gaining knowledge, an “idea,” by eating, as its “last red meal,” the heart of an elk. The knowledge gained is that the wolverine, being the last of its kind, can afford to confront its enemies directly, come out of hiding and take on the insurgents, fight to the inevitable end. And as this predatory meal is the source of the wolverine’s courage, we have come full circle, back again to the “horrid dream” of “The Heaven of Animals,” the nightmare of the natural world we must accept if we are to live fully.

But Dickey cannot maintain such a vision any longer; the enemy is too strong. The fight is hopeless. The wolverine will die out. The eagle will die out. Civilization will kill them. And civilization will kill the poet, too. The earth is no longer raw heaven but, rather, cuisine—bloodless, cooked, and flavorless.

And that is the ultimate meaning of the natural-heaven theme in James Dickey’s poems: to live successfully, intensely, we must accept the natural world as it is, bloody as it is, and fight to keep our place in the processes of earth, here and now. Eating, which, on earth, means also to be eaten, is the symbol of an active powerful love of life, and love of the earth that is life’s source.

Our way to heaven, Dickey cries in “For the Last Wolverine,” is “to eat / The world, and not to be driven off it.” According to some readers, however, Dickey himself has driven humanity from the world of “The Heaven of Animals.”…

The omission of people from Dickey’s heaven does not, of itself, mean that the unity of existence is destroyed by humanity’s consciousness. Omission does not necessarily mean exclusion; it means, possibly, that people are to be included in the natural processes as one with the animals, as predators even, without morally superior natures. We are not like animals, we are animals. It is not a matter of being psychologically unable to participate in a “remorseless” cycle of killing and eating; we do participate in the cycle. That we do not recognize our part in it, or that we try to make ourselves superior to it, proves the strength of our ancient fear and guilt. The point of the natural-heaven theme is to show us that we do indeed participate in the violent cycle and to suggest that the acceptance of our place in it would lead us to “heaven,” a message that makes moot the question of humanity’s corruption. Beatitude is what is; each being is a part of it.

In virtually every James Dickey poem, the sympathetic reader finds the poet’s serious effort to say something fundamentally important. There is probably no less whimsical poet, yet there is no poet more joyful. This blend of seriousness and joy stems, at least in part, from Dickey’s rejection of the traditional ideal realm built upon denial of life’s physical realities, and from his own acceptance of those realities. But we should not think that joy easily achieved. As such poems as “Falling,” “For the Last Wolverine,” and even “The Heaven of Animals” demonstrate, much—the luxuries of civilization and the notion of an entirely free will— must be divested, and this divestiture sometimes happens only as a last resort. The woman in “Falling” becomes a goddess because there is nothing else she can do except fall to earth. The last wolverine achieves its ferocious nobility only because it is cornered. The predators and prey in “The Heaven of Animals” cannot choose any other course of action. Thus, an emotional-philosophical struggle pushing the poet toward visions of unity seems to underlie these poems. It is possible that Dickey’s emotional-philosophical struggle arises from his knowledge that the creatures of nature, including humans, must kill and die but that he rejoices because he knows species exist far longer than the individuals that compose them (“forever” he might say in his expansive “heavenly” mood) and because he knows that individuals are species’ particular loci of uniqueness. Perhaps such knowledge has given rise to the passionate regard for the dignity of each creature and of all creation—and for the union of the two—Dickey has shown in the natural-heaven images.

Source: Marion Hodge, “James Dickey’s Natural Heaven,” in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 56, No. 4, November 1991, pp. 57-61, 66-8.

David Kelly

David Kelly is an instructor of creative writing at several community colleges in Illinois, as well as a fiction writer and playwright. In the following essay, Kelly argues that a simplified vision of heaven, as a place of infinite space and time, weakens this poem’s credibility and its message.

Writing about his poem “The Heaven of Animals,” James Dickey once explained that he had a long-standing fascination with the concept of heaven, not because of all the wonders it might hold but because heaven is an eternal place. Think about those last few words, and you can see how the concept could linger in his mind—it’s a fascinating, self-negating concept. It’s harder to get an idea of an eternal place than it is to think of eternal life. We might be able to accept the idea that life goes on in some different bodiless form after death, because nobody really understands the mysteries involved there. The mysteries of the physical world are much fewer, though; its workings are better understood, and so the idea of an eternal place is much harder to swallow. Places as we know them cannot be eternal. For one thing, they decay: molecules reorganize, things fall apart.

And yet, the idea of a continuing soul is always linked to this idea of a place where the soul can go. As Dickey explained his interest once, “the fact that men have held the idea of heaven, or some kind of eternal life, for such a long time in so many different ways gives the concept a certain authenticity, I think.” This takes the poet’s interest beyond the scientific question of whether the existence of an eternal place is or isn’t provable to the workings of the human mind that would be so interested in such a far-fetched idea. To a creative mind such as Dickey’s, the concept of an eternal place is gold. It’s pyrite, though: fools’ gold, deceptively worthwhile, a thrilling discovery that turns out to be worthless.

The “twist” of “The Heaven of Animals”—the thing that makes it fresh and original and keeps it from being a stuffy old philosophical treatise—is that he applies the concept of eternity to animals. We don’t like to think about animals having a place in eternity. We butcher and swat and trap and poison too many to reconcile our actions to the thought of their immortal souls. Worse, though, but seldom considered, is the fact that their presence in heaven would increase the population of the place many times over. It is hard enough to conceive of some area that could hold all of the people you ever met, and then adding to that everyone you ever heard of, then multiplying by a few million to account for the worthy people whose existence never touched your own; but add to that chipmunks, lemurs, musk-oxen, tapirs, gnats, crocodiles, finches, and the rest of the animals that have lived on earth since life began here, and whatever it is that you dream heaven to be eventually becomes inconceivable. This might not bother some, who accept the poem’s “Outdoing, desperately / Outdoing what is required” to settle the problem of space. Heaven, being theoretical, can be thought to have ample elbow room, or else the problem can be washed away with some fancy theory about how heaven isn’t a place but a different mode of existence. But how should we think of that different mode? If it’s not physical, then what is it? I say that if we can’t think of heaven in terms that we understand, then we can’t think about it at all.

When we picture heaven, it has enough room for milling about with our friends, or, if you would like, to go and look up people you wish you had a chance to know, to have question-and-answer sessions with Socrates and James Weldon Johnson and Elvis. Dickey allows milling-about space to the heaven of animals, too, and this is what causes his worst problem. Once he has established his theoretical boundaries—actually, once he has waved boundaries away—he is left with the question of what these animals, with unlimited time and space, would do there.

Of course, since it is heaven, the first answer that comes to mind is that they will do whatever they feel like doing (and perhaps be reunited with their owners). As an old proverb put it, “Heaven is the place where the donkey at last catches up with the carrot.” Good for the donkey, but not much of a heaven for the carrot. In “The Heaven of Animals,” Dickey recognizes that some animals don’t like to eat carrots, that they want to eat the donkey. He thinks they should be allowed to indulge the one thing that their instincts desire. This is their heaven, after all. Good for the carnivores, bad for the donkeys.

Richard J. Calhoun and Robert W. Hill, who explained Dickey well in their insightful book-length study of his career, raised an interesting point that might indicate conflicting emotions at the heart of this poem. Along with other poems they studied, they saw in “The Heaven of Animals” a fear of animals and their potential for mindless violence. Dickey was an avid hunter, more public about his fascination with the struggle against nature than any writer, perhaps, since Hemingway, and it is easy to believe that at the center of his struggle is an “eye-for-eye” philosophy; that we should get them before they get us, if it comes to that. The problem is that it does not come to that for us who live in developed areas, as Dickey did. There are very few places where one might, while going about one’s business, happen across an animal that wants to kill. If Dickey felt uneasy about the fact that it is the nature of predatory animals to kill, as Calhoun and Hill tell us he was, he could avoid the situation by staying home. As a hunter, he sought out the mindlessly violent animals that disturbed him, and, as a poet, he had to explore how he felt about them.

And yet, he must not have felt complete adversity, because he allowed eternity. As a premise of this poem, he had to decide what the vicious creatures and, more important, what their helpless prey, would do with timeless time and endless space and the nature of good and evil. The poem touches on issues of power, identity, and the nature of good and evil. In some ways it resembles human actions, but too much of the way these animals behave is derived from the fact that the situation Dickey has made up for them can’t support his light characterizations.

It does not matter how perfected the claws and teeth are: being torn apart by them just cannot be anyone’s idea of a happy way to spend eternity. The only way Dickey can make this a convincing heaven and fill the gap in the situation he has postulated is to use the most basic, clunky sort of metaphysics—deciding that victims must be made for victimization, because, on earth, they keep going for it, time after time. The prey in this poem not only accept their fate, but they relish the chance to be attacked, reassembled, and attacked once more. The prey he imagines “feel no fear / But acceptance, compliance.” Perhaps this is true of animals low on the food chain, whose neural systems are barely developed: they would see no difference between being devoured and winning a prize. In the course of things, they might not care one way or another about being another animal’s prey, although a big hole is blown in Dickey’s scheme by the existence of animals that are vegetarian but are also fleet of foot—clearly their nature is not to catch nor to be caught. But Dickey might be right—he has studied this whole hunter/prey relationship more than most. Prey might accept their lot, especially since, as the poem tells us, the pain and fear we associate with animal attacks just does not exist in the heaven of animals. They might not mind it, but that is a far cry from their finding a heaven in the constant cycle of dismemberment and reassembly.

In order to integrate the preyed-upon into the heaven of animals and to make it worth their sticking around for eternity, Dickey has to give them a higher purpose. Whether he does this to parody man’s own inclination to offer up adversity to a higher cause or because he actually believed animals to be playing a necessary role in a big system is not clear from the poem. This heaven can apparently be worth experiencing to them, as long as they know what is going to happen next: as long as they walk in full knowledge. Killer or killed, both seem equally content as long as they don’t have to struggle with uncertainty. The “heaven” part of their afterlife seems to be that they are allowed to shed their consciousness. But these are animals: it was the poet who projected consciousness on them to begin with. It might seem a nice idea to grant to animals the eternity that man always imagines for himself, but without granting them consciousness in order to know what to do with infinite space and time, they just become little eating machines matched with corresponding masochists. This might be meant as a reflection of humankind, but it would be hard to take a lesson seriously when it is doled out in such vague terms.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 1999.

Nelson Hathcock

In the following excerpt, Hathcock discusses the importance of realizing that “The Heaven of Animals” entails human viewpoint and perspective.

James Dickey has been called a neo-Romantic primitive often enough for this appellation to have acquired the ring of truth, and the earlier poems in the volume Poems 1957–1967 tend to bear it out. In the volume partially included there, called Drowning With Others, one of the concerns of a significant number of poems is with the kinship of human and animal, a phenomenon for which Dickey obviously has special feelings. For him the natural world is rarely a mere literary symbol of the “not me”; it is, rather, another chamber of the full life, one he is able to penetrate by means of the willful imaginative act. Essentially, it is in this all-embracing outlook that Dickey’s particular Romanticism obtains.

Yet Dickey never fails to be contemporary, for all of his sanguinary urges to run with the beasts; as twentieth-century man he experiences the general dissolution and frustration that seem a portion of life in these times. I wish to point out how this feeling of separateness creeps in, and it will suggest a new meaning for one of Dickey’s most discussed and most frequently anthologized poems, “The Heaven of Animals.”…

“The Heaven of Animals” is an oddly quiet poem even though the scene described could be characterized as one of Darwinian ruthlessness. The lines are mostly short—three-stress measures—steadily paced, and there is never any doubt that the unseen speaker is in absolute control of his utterance.

The location is more specifically realized in the first line by the immediacy of present time and place—“Here they are”—than by specific evocations. As we read on, we see the reason. This heaven is amorphous, with the existence of the animals themselves dictating its features after they have awakened from some previous life “in a wood” or “on plains.” This place, if we can call it that, does share something with the human conception of heaven, for it is permanent, with “grass rolling / Under their feet forever.”

With the second stanza, such similarities end, and the heaven of animals is apparently distinguished from any human ideal:

   Having no souls, they have come,
   Anyway, beyond their knowing.
   Their instincts wholly bloom
   And they rise.
   The soft eyes open.

These animals seem to have qualified for their rewards by virtue of a deficit—“having no souls.” But this lack is compensated for by something else—their instincts which “wholly bloom.” Here is a heaven uncomplicated by any questions of good or evil. No words of judgment have made it available, for that human factor does not exist. The beasts have simply become, somehow, more fully animal, their instincts honed and heightened. Reflecting the presence of these beings, the natural surroundings alter:

   To match them, the landscape flowers,
   Outdoing, desperately
   Outdoing what is required:
   The richest wood,
   The deepest field.

This heaven is figured in superlatives, a place where all is the same, only better, fuller, richer.

Then the poem shifts its focus and the next four stanzas introduce the animals themselves, but not through any particularized description. Rather, they are divided into two groups—the hunters and the hunted—and any world in which the inhabitants can be divided into two classes is basically un-complicated. The predators are shown only to “hunt, as they have done, / But with teeth and claws grown perfect, / More deadly than they can believe.” These are generic beasts of prey descending upon the backs of generic prey. It might even be argued that they are not real animals, but that is not important. The point that the poem seems to make here is that it is the act—what Paul Carroll [in his The Poem in Its Skin] calls “the ecstasy of violence”—which is most arresting. The lines which depict the slaying tell much about how the beasts are perceived through a man’s eyes:

   And their descent
   Upon the bright backs of their prey
   May take years
   In a sovereign floating of joy.

In this image we can see the Disney nature film which Dickey claims [in Self Interviews] provided a measure of inspiration for the poem, but we also are made aware of the timelessness of the vision. Like a film projected again and again, this same sacrifice in the jungle or on the veldt is a momentary stage in the natural cycle, certain to be relentlessly duplicated. Carroll explains the final word of the passage above in this way: “On earth, predatory beasts hunt only to find food; in heaven, they hunt only for the joy of it.” This observation has some validity, as far as it goes, but I must disagree with Carroll’s basic contention that we are seeing through the animals’ eyes in this poem. The “joy” and “glory” of this heaven are imposed by the imagination of the man (or God, if you will) who has created this place. “Joy” and “glory” can only be perceived by the eye of the soul.

The second category of beast here, the hunted, reveals one more vital aspect of Dickey’s creatures:

   And those that are hunted
   Know this as their life,
   Their reward: to walk

   Under such trees in full knowledge
   Of what is in glory above them,
   And to feel no fear,
   But acceptance, compliance.

In this world one’s “life” equals his “reward,” a truly Edenic state. Certainly, the awareness of one’s place and the acceptance of it in the ever-shifting cycle of nature and history is a kind of perfection. The final stanza is a capsule of the entire poem, the Heraclitean cycle reproduced in miniature, serving also to end the piece where it began. The poem’s structure reflects the cycle that is its ostensible subject.

But I must now return to a point made earlier and elaborate on it. It is a mistake to believe that the poet has intended us to see this vision of heaven through the “soft eyes” of its beastly citizens. The poem is a human utterance, “a man speaking to other men,” and therefore the question of perspective and viewpoint is crucial. In this case it is the key to the meaning.

The questions that arise are, “Why has Dickey chosen to show us this heaven?” and further, “What does the poem show us about him?” Of course, we do not read poetry to learn about the lives of its writers; poems are a singularly unreliable source for such information. But we do read it to find out something more about ourselves, about Man with capital “M.” So, let us say that what we have here is an unlocated, unspecific landscape with unnamed creatures in it, presented to us by an unknown man, not necessarily by our neo Romantic-sportsman-warrior poet. What, then, is the consequence?…

We can assume … in “The Heaven of Animals” that a man is telling us of the heaven, but …, he is not in the scene which he describes, not strolling the “richest wood” or the “deepest field,” but is somewhere else, excluded. (For a heaven of animals it is only appropriate that the sign above the gate reads—No Humans Allowed.) This exclusion creates the subliminal lament of the poem. Our speaker persists in observing, however, because he feels that something is here for him. In the chantlike cadence of his sentences and in the type of detail he dwells upon, there runs a current of wistful envy and longing. He envies the power of blood and claw—the elemental, instinctive act—a power made possible by the animals’ curious lack of spirit.

Without souls, these beasts are spared necessarily the guilt, the desire, the fear, the frustrations that men know intimately each day. Each day we remark the mixed blessing of the soul, that complicating factor in our existence. The pure intellect would allow us to rationalize dispassionately, but the very nature of the soul makes that impossible; there is always more to consider. The events of our lives, if granted more than a passing glance, are never simple. At one time or another we have all envied the terrible bliss of a heaven like the one described, a submission to naturalistic urges. Dickey’s choice of a preposition in his title is therefore significant. It is not “The Heaven for Animals” because the heaven is for the poet, for the man who considers it and creates it in his mind. It is made of animals living on the plane of instinctive motivation we humans have long since tried to bury or subdue. While this heaven is one into which the yaks and leopards and buffalo awaken, it is also a heaven from which we have awakened and found ourselves human.

At base a certain purity and simplicity are the attractions of this state, qualities which make possible the “glory” of the hunter and the “full knowledge” of the hunted with their “acceptance, compliance.” These creatures are simple beings moving resistlessly toward simple fates “without pain,” without fear. To live is their reward; they look no further and hope for no heaven. Not so for the man who stands by and watches. Dickey’s demonstrated love for the primitive and elemental forces of the natural world qualifies him as one who would stand and watch. At the same time, his power as a poet guarantees us that only standing and watching would not be enough for him. “The Heaven of Animals” represents an instance of longing transfigured by creative power. This heaven is the poet’s possession, a stay against the fear of death. In a strange way he has looked at the animals and, in so doing, confirmed his own fragile humanity as a man who cannot after all become a beast—in that respect he is like all of us—but he also realizes that there is a heaven there to be had, and in that sense he is like few of us indeed.

Source: Nelson Hathcock, “The Predator, the Prey, and the Poet in Dickey’s ‘Heaven of Animals,’” in Concerning Poetry, Vol. 18, Nos. 1 and 2, 1985, pp. 47, 52–5.

Sources

Calhoun, Richard J., and Robert W. Hill, James Dickey, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983.

Dickey, James, Self-Interviews, recorded and edited by Barbara and James Reiss, New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1970.

For Further Study

Dickey, James, “The Self As Agent,” Sorties, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1971. pp. 155-70.

In this essay, the author explains the ways that a poet is revealed through his works. This exploration is especially interesting when examining a poem like “The Heaven of Animals,” which has no clear persona for the speaker.

Howard, Richard, “On James Dickey,” Partisan Review, Vol. 33, summer 1966, pp. 111-28.

Howard examines themes and images that run throughout Dickey’s works, drawing from a huge number of poems for examples.

Leiberman, Laurence, The Achievement of James Dickey: A Comprehensive Selection of his Poems With a Critical Introduction, Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman Co., 1968.

Although this study was written relatively early in Dickey’s career, almost thirty years before his death, it is a useful source because it covers the era of this poem and examines major poetic interest and concerns that ran throughout his works.

Oates, Joyce Carol, “Out of Stone, Into Flesh: The Imagination of James Dickey,” in The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, edited by Bruce Weigl and T. R. Hummer, Chicago: the University of Illinois Press, 1984, pp. 64-107.

Oates looks at Dickey’s whole career with careful deliberation, finding “The Heaven of Animals” to be well structured but strangely, for Dickey, impersonal.

Ramsey, Paul, “James Dickey: Meter and Structure” in James Dickey: The Expansive Imagination, edited by Richard J. Calhoun, Deland, FL: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1973, pp. 177-94.

Although “The Heaven of Animals” is written in free verse, it is interesting to compare it to Ramsey’s observations about structural techniques used in other poems.

Vanetta, Dennis, “James Dickey: A Checklist of Secondary Sources” in The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey, edited by Bruce Weigl and T. R. Hummer, Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1984, pp. 174-95.

Because Dickey was a famous and popular poet at a time when English literature departments were tuning out a record number of theorists and intellectuals, there has been much written about him—too much, in fact, for the average reader to keep track of. This bibliography lists more than three hundred articles about Dickey and includes information about other, even more complete, check lists.

Poetry for Students