Manuscript of James Dickey's "Sleeping Out at Easter," 1960

This week, VQR is highlighting James Dickey, one of the foremost American poets of the twentieth century. Dickey first appeared in VQR in the Spring 1960 issue, with his poem “Sleeping Out at Easter.” This poem later opened his first collection, Into the Stone and Other Poems (Scribner, 1960). After its publication, Dickey was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and left his career in advertising to focus on poetry full-time. A prolific writer, Dickey produced four collections of poetry over the following five years, including Buckdancer’s Choice (Wesleyan, 1965), which won the National Book Award. A frequent contributor to VQR’s pages, publishing eight more poems and a review between 1960 and 1965, Dickey won the 1962 Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry. From 1966 to 1968, Dickey served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, an office that would later become the U. S. Poet Laureate.