Daily Inspiration Quote by James Dickey

Dickey’s line is a contradiction that refuses to stay contradictory. “Fever” is the body’s rebellion - heat, delirium, a system pushed past comfort into revelation or breakdown. To ask for that in poetry is to reject the tasteful, museum-glass version of art. He’s after intensity that feels physiological: language that makes you sweat, that risks ugliness, that can’t be faked with polish. The repetition (“a fever, a fever”) isn’t ornamental; it’s insistence, like a pulse. He’s not requesting “passion” in the soft, inspirational-poster sense. He wants the dangerous kind: the kind that changes the reader’s temperature.

Then comes the pivot: “and tranquillity.” Not calm as in blandness, but calm as control. Dickey is staking out a craft ideal where the poem burns without collapsing into mere rant. The subtext is almost a rebuke to two temptations: the cool, mannered poem that never breaks a sweat; and the overheated confession that mistakes rawness for truth. Tranquillity is what makes fever legible, shaped, transmissible.

The context matters: Dickey came out of a mid-century American moment suspicious of both academic decorum and easy sincerity. A veteran with a taste for the elemental (nature, violence, awe), he often wrote as if the civilized surface were a thin membrane over something feral. This line is a mission statement for that tension: poetry as controlled combustion, where the mind keeps its balance while the nerves catch fire.