“The writing of the screenplay became an intense and extremely stimulating sort of game in which, with a camera in the hands of God rather than any mortal cinemaphotographer, I wrote the scenes one after the other as I would like to have them be.”—from the Afterword This is the original screenplay that Dickey submitted to Warner Brothers. He had begun it with the idea of creating a work that would stand on its own as a work of art and still enhance and deepen the audience’s apprehension of their individual experience of Deliverance and its special meaning to them. When he sent this screenplay to Warner Brothers it was with a sense of having accomplished that goal—“I was convinced I had put down on paper what I wanted to happen on the screen, no matter who the director was, or the actors, or any of the rest of the crew.” But while acknowledging the creativity, bravery, and dedication of John Boorman and the actors and the crew who made the film version of Deliverance, Dickey also states that their realization is not the film as he would have had it. That film exists only in his imagination and within this screenplay. The story as filmed is presented in twenty-two production stills that speak of the undeniable strengths of the production that received nominations from the Motion Picture Academy for its awards of best picture, best direction, and best editing. Arthur Knight described the film as “one of those rare films that resonates like a literary work but that—rarer still—avoids either being or sounding literary.” Dickey concludes his Afterword with an invitation to the reader to “show [the screenplay] in the widescreen theater of his mind and compare it with the version he has seen in actual theaters, or on television.”
Author
Dickey was born in Atlanta, Georgia. After serving as a pilot in the Second World War, he attended Vanderbilt University. Having earned an MA in 1950, Dickey returned to military duty in the Korean War, serving with the US Air Force. Upon return to civilian life Dickey taught at Rice University in Texas and then at the University of Florida. From 1955 to 1961, he worked for advertising agencies in New York and Atlanta. After the publication of his first book, Into the Stone (Middletown, Conn., 1962), he left advertising and began teaching at various colleges and universities. He became poet-in-residence and Carolina Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. Dickey's third volume, Buckdancer's Choice (Middletown, 1965), won the prestigious National Book Award in Poetry. From 1966 to 1968 he served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. In 1977 Dickey read his poem 'The Strength of Fields' at President Carter's inauguration. The Hollywood film of his novel Deliverance (Boston, 1970) brought Dickey fame not normally enjoyed by poets. Dickey's poems are a mixture of lyricism and narrative. In some volumes the lyricism dominates, while in others the narrative is the focus. The early books, influenced obviously though not slavishly by Theodore Roethke and perhaps Hopkins, are infused with a sense of private anxiety and guilt. Both emotions are called forth most deeply by the memories of a brother who died before Dickey was born ('In the Tree House at Night') and his war experiences ('Drinking From a Helmet'). These early poems generally employ rhyme and metre. With Buckdancer's Choice, Dickey left traditional formalism behind, developing what he called a 'split-line' technique to vary the rhythm and look of the poem. Some critics argue that by doing so Dickey freed his true poetic voice. Others lament that the lack of formal device led to rhetorical, emotional, and intellectual excess. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two assessments, and it will be left to the reader to decide which phase of Dickey's career is most attractive. Dickey's most comprehensive volume is The Whole Motion (Hanover, NH, and London, 1992). His early poems are collected in The Early Motion (Middletown, 1981). Recent individual volumes include The Eagle's Mile (Hanover and London, 1990) and Falling, May Day Sermon, and Other Poems (Hanover and London, 1982). Dickey has also published collections of autobiographical essays, Self Interviews (Garden City, NY, 1970; repr. New York, 1984) and Sorties (Garden City, 197 1; repr. New York, 1984). From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamilton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press.
