[2] After graduation from North Fulton High in 1941, Dickey completed a postgraduate year at Darlington School in Rome, Georgia.

Dickey asked to be dismissed from the Darlington rolls in a 1941 letter to the principal, deeming the school the most "disgusting combination of cant, hypocrisy, cruelty, class privilege and inanity I have ever since encountered at any human institution.

During World War II, Dickey served with the U.S. Army Air Forces, where he flew thirty-eight missions in the Pacific Theater as a P-61 Black Widow radar operator with the 418th Night Fighter Squadron, an experience that influenced his work, and for which he was awarded five Bronze Stars.

Between the wars, he attended Vanderbilt University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in English and philosophy (as well as minoring in astronomy) in 1949.

This incident some critics believe he manipulated to his advantage, he became a successful copy writer for advertising agencies selling Coca-Cola and Lay's potato chips while in his free time writing some of his best poetry.

On January 20, 1977, Dickey was invited to read his poem The Strength of Fields[10]: 378-379  at the inauguration of Jimmy Carter.

Dickey died on January 19, 1997, aged 73, six days after his last class at the University of South Carolina, where from 1968 he taught as poet in residence.

Dickey spent his last years in and out of hospitals, afflicted with severe alcoholism,[12] jaundice and later pulmonary fibrosis.