William Hobart Dickey (December 15, 1928 – May 3, 1994) was an American poet and professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University.
He later recalled: First to have been at Reed College as an undergraduate with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, second to have been in John Berryman's extraordinary and intense poetry workshop with W.D.
Snodgrass, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Paul Petrie, Robert Dana, Constance Urdang, Jane Cooper, Donald Finkel, Henri Coulette—the list continues beyond the capacity of my memory, but it was a course I approached with rapture and fear, owing in part to Berryman's sometimes jagged abruptness, as when, having warned me beforehand that he was going to exhibit the profound mortality of one of my works, he held it out at arm's length in the class, looked at it with loathing, and said "Now, what are we to say about this ridiculous poem?
[3]Among Dickey's collections of poetry, More Under Saturn won a silver medal from the Commonwealth Club of California in 1972, and The Rainbow Grocery received the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press in 1978.
In 1962, he joined the faculty of San Francisco State University and taught as a professor of English and creative writing until his retirement in 1991.