[In the following favorable review of Babel to Byzantium, Carroll examines the critical backlash against Dickey's work.]

After I talk about this collection of book reviews and essays on modern poets—which seems to me the sanest, most invigorating and most fun to read since Randall Jarrell's Poetry and the Age (1953)—I want to try and put into perspective a nasty attempt at poetic fratricide in which James Dickey has been the target. Why I bother with such dirty literary linen is simple: I want everybody to read and enjoy Mr. Dickey without the distraction encouraged by the scuttlebutt resulting from the attempt at fratricide, which was manufactured, for the most part, by envy, it would seem. Not only has James Dickey shown the unmistakable “blue sign of his god on the forehead,” as St.-John Perse describes the true poet, which holds the promise that we may have a major poet in our midst (indeed, why his collected Poems: 1957-67 failed to win the 1968 Pulitzer Prize remains, to my mind, more baffling than the intricacies displayed in most of the theories regarding John F. Kennedy's assassination) but he also writes the kind of criticism I admire—namely, direct, personal talk about this poet or that poem in his or its own skin, as it were.

What commends the prose in Babel to Byzantium is similar to what makes the best of Mr. Dickey's poems memorable: the honesty and authority of the insight, unburdened by literary fashion or even by the critic's previous judgment; and the originality and power of the imagination at work on material that counts.

When I suggest that the insight is honest and has authority I mean that it is the last thing from that type of tidy, judicious opinion one reads (only during Lent, hopefully) in so many reviews and essays. One learns to trust Dickey to say only what he feels. What he feels can compel you, in turn, to reread a writer whom you may have dismissed as an adolescent infatuation or to open yourself to one whom you've never read. Of Kenneth Patchen for instance, Dickey says: “It is wrong of us to wish Patchen would ‘pull himself together.’ He has never been together. He cannot write poems, as this present book (When We Were Here Together) heartlessly demonstrates. But his authentic and terrible hallucinations infrequently come to great good among the words which they must use. We should leave it at that,” he concludes, “and take what we can from him.” Or of John Logan and the lack of wider recognition his work merits but hasn't received: “His strange kind of innocence, walking in and out of his ecclesiastical and literary knowledgeableness, is not an easy thing to talk about, though anyone who reads Mr. Logan cannot fail to be excited and uplifted by it.” Then the insight blazes: “(Logan) is far beyond the Idols of the Marketplace and works where the work itself is done out of regard for the world he lives in and the people he lives among because he is helplessly and joyously what he is.”

Fluctuating quotations on the literary stock market obviously do not interest Dickey. He refuses to take on faith alone, for example, the veneration afforded Charles Olson and his poetics of “composition by field” by some of the poets associated with the old Black Mountain College and by some of the Beat poets, as well as by some of the younger poets, longing, it would seem, for apostolic succession. Examining Olson's theory and its practice in The Maximus Poems, Dickey finds both second-hand and not too interesting news. But he is not out to hatchet another poet, granting that Olson's mind “seems to me quite a capable one, and at all points working hard to say what it has been given it. That is enough, because it has to be.” On the other hand, J. V. Cunningham, John Frederick Nims, Elder Olson, and Reed Whittemore are treated as poets and not as “minor voices from the '40s.” Nims, for one, is often dismissed by fellow poets and critics as a virtuoso. Not by Dickey: “Mr. Nims has worked hard for a good many years to achieve his style of unremitting brilliance, and it behooves us to look closely at what he is doing”—which he does, with care and energy.

And the originality and power of the imagination seem without equal, in my opinion, among practicing critics. “Opening a book by Robert Penn Warren is like putting out the light of the sun,” Dickey observes, “or like plunging into the labyrinth and feeling the thread break after the first corner is passed.” His is an imagination which leaps beyond mere critical insight: “One will never come out the same Self as that in which one entered. When he is good, and often when he is bad, you had as soon read Warren as live.” Truths such as this, arrived at only through the imagination, occur again and again throughout this book.

In addition, Dickey almost always exhibits that rare gift: he is able to transcend a fundamental antipathy to some poet's work—which he describes, however, clearly and forcefully—and to discover what he feels is genuine in the poems. After arguing that Robert Duncan, for instance, is “certainly one of the most unpityingly pretentious poets I have ever come across,” he also praises Duncan's “ingenuousness,” the originality of his intellect, and several “marvelous” Duncan poems. Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, Allen Ginsberg, and Gene Derwood are other poets whom Dickey dislikes. In each, however, he finds nuggets of genuine poetry.

In brief, these book reviews of some 65 American and British poets are free of that myopia, parochialism and occasional smugness or patronizing tone found in much criticism. Instead, Dickey's reviews are clear-sighted, catholic in taste, and exuberantly respectful as only one poet can be towards the effort of one of his fellows. Best of all, Dickey ignores what he calls the critic's expected “System of Evaluation,” which he is supposed to defend not only on its practical and local instances but in its broader theoretical and philosophical implications as well. On the contrary, Dickey explores only his immediate, existential experience of this poet or that poem. And he does so in clear, masculine prose. (His lack of a critical system is the only possible fault I can find in this book. As far as I'm concerned, however, such lack is a virtue.)

In addition to the book reviews, there are longer essays on Edward Arlington Robinson—a valuable discussion which I know will send me back to Robinson soon—and on Robert Frost—an analysis so accurate in defining both Frost's genius and his spiteful, egocentric personality that one feels like laughing and weeping at once. Then there are five good shorter essays on individual poems, ranging from Smart's “A Song of David” to Francis Thompson's “The Hound of Heaven” to Williams' “The Yachts.” (An entire book on individual poems he loves would be a happy event, I think, from which everybody would benefit.)

Finally, three essays are grouped under the umbrella, “The Poet Turns on Himself.” “Barnstorming for Poetry” delineates what it feels like for a middleaged man suddenly to find himself a literary lion overnight as he sings, staggers, and suffers from college to college during an exhausting, exhilarating reading tour. Every poet who has ever run such a curious gauntlet will read this piece with (what Melville called in a far different context, I'm afraid) “that shock of recognition.” “Notes on the Decline of Outrage” should be read, and read carefully, by anyone who likes to think of James Dickey as a Georgia redneck. He isn't. What we come to know instead is a man, who was born white and raised in the Georgia of 40 years ago, trying to explore, as much in touch with his feelings as he can get, what it means to him to think about abandoning inherited, familial attitudes towards Negroes. What that man decides, as well as how he reaches the decision, will not satisfy those addicted to easy abstract slogans; but I suspect the essay will be admired by those who care more about individuals than abstractions or clichés or finding a mirror which will reflect their opinions and prejudices. I know I admire the essay almost as much as James Baldwin's masterpiece, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” and for the same reason: both offer one man, feeling and thinking with his own heart, memories, and brains.

Now, I'd like to turn to the attempt at poetic fratricide mentioned at the beginning of this review.

“The Hunting of the Dickey” has become a popular, if vulgar, sport among a growing number of poets and poetasters. A few weeks ago, for example, I heard one of the younger poets, who is bright and well-read, dimiss Dickey as being the David Ogilvy of American verse. When asked if he'd read such magnificent Dickey poems as “The Sleep Child,” “Slave Quarters” or “The Heaven of the Animals,” he admitted, rather sheepishly, he had not; even more depressing, the poet confessd that, due to bad-mouthing against Dickey he'd heard along the literary grapevine, he'd decided not to bother with the criticism collected in Babel to Byzantium.

Exactly what are Dickey's crimes or sins? I thought, after this melancholy encounter. Most of the charges I've heard poets make against Dickey seem to have been brought into melodramatic focus by Robert Bly in his well-read essay, “The Collapse of James Dickey” (The Sixties, Spring, 1967). In that piece, Mr. (I almost said Captain) Bly tries to secure Dickey to the yardarm and flog him because some of the poems in Buckdancer's Choice (National Book Award, 1966) exhibit “a gloating about power over others.” According to Bly, this gloating manifests itself most clearly in such poems as “Slave Quarters”—that almost classic work depicting the sensibility of a contemporary white Southerner enmeshed in the cunning bondage of memory and fantasy of what an antebellum plantation owner might have felt—and in “Firebombing”—a long, often tedious poem which, with considerable honesty and power, embodies an attempt by a middleaged suburbanite to relive in memory the excitement and youthful virility felt when he was a bomber pilot flying missions over Japan during World War II. Both are poems of “memory and desire”: haunting, masculine, poignant. Clearly the first is not the apologia pro rednecks Mr. Bly discovers, nor is the latter a paean to “the American habit of firebombing Asians.” But Bly shows little interest in reading them as poems: instead, he chooses to bully poems into being flagrantly “repulsive” examples of what he claims is their author's moral leprosy.

The Bly essay concludes, then, with a libel against Mr. Dickey. The poet is branded as “a sort of Georgia cracker Kipling,” presumably because he earns an annual ＄25,000 from activities resulting from his being a poet, publishes some of his verse in The New Yorker, allegedly supports the Vietnam war, and reveals himself in general as “a toady to the government, supporting all movement toward Empire.”

Frankly, the Bly essay appalled me. How could a critic with his sensibility and extremely wide reading, I wondered, allow his argument to be grounded on the silly assumption that since the Dickey poems espouse few of the virtues cherished by white Northern liberals, the poems were “repulsive” and their author an Establishment stooge and moral pariah? Mr. Bly's essay is so shrill and wrong-headed that it almost seems unnecessary to recall that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot despised equalitarian democracy and, by implication, most, if not all, liberal goals; or that Apollinaire adored the war on the Western Front; or that Dante firmly believed that unless one were a baptized believer in the One, Holy, Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church one was destined for eternal misery in either hell or limbo.

Here, then, are the crimes for which Mr. Dickey stands accused by Mr. Bly and other devotees of “The Hunting of the Dickey” clan. In his poems, he explores feelings and memories of one man existing in his own flesh and bone, instead of using poetry to elicit attention by mouthing this or that current liberal or Far Left attitude about the Negro revolution or the Vietnam conflict. In addition, he earns a decent living for his family by doing what he can do with consummate skill: write poetry, read it in public, and teach it in the classroom. In other words, his crimes or sins are the ancient ones: talent, independence of attitude, and recognition and reward. Worst of all, he is only 45. Ten years ago, he was unpublished and unknown. Today, he stands as the first of his generation to have published a collected poems and a volume of criticism on modern and contemporary poets. Success is, as Ambrose Bierce reminds us, “the one unpardonable sin against one's fellows.”

(Regarding Mr. Dickey's views on Vietnam, I know only that when we talked about that wretched war one afternoon in September, 1967, the poet said that, after a lot of hard thought, he hadn't made up his mind as yet. In my opinion, our involvement in Vietnam is murder—barbarous, immoral, infectuous—and I told Dickey as much. But I also remembered that Camus refused to join the supporters of the Algerian rebels in 1957, stating that he hadn't made up his mind, thereby provoking vicious denunciations from intellectuals of the Left, including Sartre. Moreover, Dickey mentioned the possibility that he might become a speech writer for Senator Eugene McCarthy. What began as a casual acquaintanceship in 1966, when the poet assumed his responsibilities as poet to the Library of Congress, had matured into what Dickey implied was a closer relationship. At that time, he clearly was a McCarthy man; I don't know how he feels today, and it doesn't matter, of course, in so far as the irresponsible smear that he's a toady of the Pentagon and White House is concerned.)

I've spent time in describing this inept attempt at poetic fratricide by Mr. Bly—most of whose criticism and work as editor, translator and gadfly-at-large to the literary community, and whose exemplary public stands against the Vietnam war I admire without reservation—in order to say to him and to other members of “The Hunting of the Dickey” society, including that young poet: If you allow such popular but false images of James Dickey as “redneck” or “war-lover” or “careerist” to keep you from reading Babel to Byzantium, or from reading it with an unclouded eye, you'll be depriving yourself of criticism as it should be written. The man who wrote this book clearly loves and serves the god of poetry and the god's faithful disciples with (as the Baltimore Catechism prescribes with regard to another deity) his whole heart, and his whole soul, and whole mind, and whole strength.