Into the Stone and Other Poems was published in 1960 as part of the Scribner’s Poets of Today VII series, sharing the volume with two other poets (Paris Leary and Jon Swan). It was Dickey’s first collection, and it already contained the elements that would make him one of the dominant American poets of the 1960s: the narrative energy, the physical intensity, the fascination with transformation and boundary-crossing.
The poems in Into the Stone are more formally controlled than Dickey’s later work — shorter lines, tighter structures, more conventional stanza forms. But the characteristic Dickey obsessions are already present: the connection between the living and the dead, the ecstasy of physical experience pushed to its limit, the kinship between human consciousness and the animal world. “The Underground Stream” and “Sleeping Out at Easter” are early masterpieces — poems that use natural settings as catalysts for visionary experience.
The collection also introduces Dickey’s war material: poems arising from his service as a P-61 night-fighter pilot in the Pacific during World War II. These early war poems are more restrained than the explosive “Firebombing” that would come later, but they already address the central paradox: the pilot’s distance from his victims and the beauty of destruction seen from the air.
Collecting Into the Stone
First edition (Scribner’s Poets of Today VII, New York, 1960): Shared volume. Dickey’s debut.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $20–$50