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    A Study Guide for James Dickey's "The Heaven of Animals"
    A Study Guide for James Dickey's "The Heaven of Animals"
    A Study Guide for James Dickey's "The Heaven of Animals"
    Ebook32 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for James Dickey's "The Heaven of Animals"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for James Dickey's "The Heaven of Animals," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535837231
    A Study Guide for James Dickey's "The Heaven of Animals"

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      A Study Guide for James Dickey's "The Heaven of Animals" - Gale

      1

      The Heaven of Animals

      James Dickey

      1962

      Introduction

      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.

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