Criticism

Feder, Lillian. "Poetry from the Asylum: Hayden Carruth's The Bloomingdale Papers." In Literature in Medicine, Volume 4, Psychiatry and Literature (1985): 112-27.

Illustrates how Carruth's struggle for identity and selfhood while writing The Bloomingdale Papers contributed greatly to his growth as a poet.

Flint, R. W. Review of Asphalt Georgics, by Hayden Carruth. The New York Times Book Review (14 July 1985): 15.

A laudatory appraisal of Asphalt Georgics.

Gardner, Geoffrey. "The Real and Only Sanity." The American Poetry Review 10, No. 1 (January-February 1981): 19-22.

Favorable review, in which Gardner surveys Carruth's earlier works and concludes that Brothers, I Loved You All is Carruth's most accomplished writing to date.

Howard, Ben. "New Englanders." Poetry CLVI, No. 6 (September 1990): 345-48.

Extols Carruth's blending of disparate images and ideas in Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight toward the Distant Islands.

McClatchy, J. D. "Labyrinth and Clue." The Nation 236, No. 5 (5 February 1983): 148-51.

Brief positive assessment of The Sleeping Beauty in which McClatchy comments: "Carruth has fashioned a rich, complex poem on a human scale."

Oliver, Mary. "Gathering Light." The Kenyon Review VIII, No. 3 (Summer 1986): 129-35.

Responds positively to Asphalt Georgics, asserting: "In a time when the poems of many poets are frighteningly similar in style, it is salutory and important to find work that strikes out in a different direction."

Weiss, David. "The Incorrigible Dirigible." The Southern Review 26, No. 2 (April 1990): 466-69.

Characterizes the poems in Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight toward the Distant Islands as "ungainly, temperamental, prosy, anecdotal, discursive, yet 'lighter than air,'" and asserts: "Only the helium of the poet's intelligence holds them impossibly up."