"[The Zodiac] is based on another of the same title by Hendrik Marsman", Dickey explains, and "with the exception of a few lines, is completely my own." "Based" is the warranted word. Part I of Dickey's poem is almost as long (414 lines) as the whole of Marsman's (422), Parts II-XII even longer. But the telling difference grows out of the two conceptions of the hero: "A drunken Dutch poet who returns to his home in Amsterdam after years of travel and tries desperately to relate himself, by means of stars, to the universe."… (p. 120)

[The] two works … are fairly close in story but in other ways vastly apart. Marsman's narrator describes and interprets the hero's thoughts, feelings, acts; he philosophizes, he exclaims—and all in verse of conventional patterns: spare, condensed, restrained. In Dickey's poem the hero himself speaks, moans, shouts, questions, streams with visions, spits out four-letter words, curses his soul and God. Dickey disposes the words on the page as a prosody music-score, the margins and spaces reflecting the twists, turns, leaps of a man half-drunk, half-mad, half-supersane: a more-than-lifesize creature torn between whisky and stars. (pp. 120-21)

Mallarmé sought "the secret's answer" on earth ("Things already exist … we have simply to see their relationships"); the Dutch poet reads it in the sky. But for both, humanity's salvaging power is the same: the "creative" answer. Mallarmé calls for "composing the Book, the Orphic explanation of the earth … attempted by every writer." Dickey's speaker goes further, affirming that man will not fail himself so long as he is able to conceive the world imaginatively—

       So long as the hand can hold its island
         Of blazing paper, and bleed for its images:
         Make what it can of what is:
          So long as the spirit hurls on space
       The star-beasts of intellect and madness.

The avowal is no useless fancy. Poetry's "re-enactment of unification" (as The Seamless Web sought to make clear) overcomes the divisiveness within ourselves, among ourselves, and between ourselves and the universe. Poetry thus can no longer be viewed as a cultural ornament. Rather by providing as it does the fulfilment of a need of our nature, poetry serves as an instrument for human survival.

In Sorties, a book which I urged on my fellow-judges for a National Book Award, Dickey declared "I want my poem to devour the reader, so that he cannot possibly put it down as he reads it, or forget about it." The Zodiac sets a new height in this writer's achievement. It is surely the most disturbingly remarkable booklength poem in decades, charged as it is with the "raw vitalism", "the convincing speech", the insights, the visions, the unflagging intensity that Dickey attains in the finest works of his art. Let the reader make himself ready to roll with this poem as it draws him into its vortex of search and light. (pp. 123-24)