"James Dickey was a great poet, a legend of the reading circuit, and - after the best-selling Deliverance and its celebrated movie version - a celebrity. This collection, reaching from 1943 to his death in 1997, and from a fledgling poet to an ailing man of letters, constitutes a short course in literature and poetry since World War II." "Dickey's correspondents include John Berryman, Harold Bloom, Philip Booth, Richard Howard, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Donald Hall, James Merrill, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, Mark Strand, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and James Wright." "Entertaining and erudite, these letters reveal the fierce, complicated literary intellect of the man John Updike called "the high-flyer of American poets.""--Jacket.