Virgil’s Aeneas, weeping over the frescoes that depict the fall of Troy, voices the tragic sense of life that animates all poets: “Tears in the nature of things, hearts touched by human transience.” In “Resolution and Independence,” Wordsworth describes the wrenching extremes of a poet’s moods:

But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might
Of joy in minds that can no further go,
As high as we have mounted in delight
In our dejection do we sink as low.

James Dickey (1923–97), handsome, blond and blue-eyed, formidably energetic, large, and larger than life, scaled the heights. College athlete, air force navigator, advertising executive, guitarist, archer, hunter, teacher, performer and poet laureate, winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and a National Book Award, he covered the Apollo launching for Life and read his poetry at President Carter’s inauguration. He made more money from his writing than any American poet of his time. In 1996 his income was $187,000, his assets $800,000, and he was “practically a conglomerate.” But he knew the tears of things, and caused a good many of them to be shed. He was a tragic figure who exclaimed: “I am a haunted artist like the others. I know what the monsters know.”

Dickey has been ill served, even betrayed, by his son, by his literary executor, and by his biographer, who show little understanding of his genius or the reasons for his agonizing suffering and sharp decline. Christopher Dickey’s memoir, Summer of Deliverance(1998), by