[James Dickey is a] poet whose best work has always been charged with the presence of the master performer. The best of his Poems 1957–1967 work like an ideal, reversed ending of the Oz story: the curtain might be pulled aside for a glimpse of the professor working the levers to produce the sound effects and smoke, but the wizardry—contrived as it may be—continues anyway, and with a great deal of success. There is no demand for a return to the farm in Kansas—or Georgia—where real life is without magic and masks altogether. Instead, all sorts of bizarre and unlikely conjurings go on: a traffic jam becomes the Apocalypse, a military execution turns into an acrobatic stunt, a man's legs fall asleep and pick up the dream of the hunting dog sleeping on his feet. The artifices of showmanship and magic save us in poems such as "The Hospital Window," "The Celebration," "Slave Quarters," "Power and Light." They save us from sentimentality, pain, or self-pity. "Guilt is magical," says the speaker at the end of "Adultery," because guilt has been performed in the poem, exorcised by a shaman-narrator who has dissolved the walls of a motel room and extended the risks of a love affair into all the open frontiers of American history. (p. 410)

In the earlier poems, Dickey [avoided] … the "confessional" sort of personality found in Lowell, Snodgrass, Berryman, or Sexton…. But while the public Dickey was developing as a showman, the poet Dickey was experimenting with how loosely personal his act could become. Eyebeaters showed some of this experimentation, but his most recent poetry, the book-length poem The Zodiac, shows an actor-poet who has gone as far as he can, almost on a dare, into a painful, public exploration of trauma. While Snodgrass or Lowell would have written unabashedly personal accounts of the loneliness, fear of failure, terror of mortality, and struggle with language that haunt Zodiac, Dickey opts for the shaman's mask …—the mask of an historical person far removed in location and time.

In this case, though, the mask is too flimsy and the role too superficial, so that not even Dickey can play it right. Juggling with materials that he does not want to play confessionally, Dickey slips in his act and is finally unable to achieve the distance of the public, acting figure. Zodiac, which awed and puzzled most of its critics, demonstrates enough of the old Dickey eloquence and power to make it worthwhile to ask what went wrong. More than that, it asks us to examine what is perhaps the real difference between confessional and non-confessional poetry: the extent to which the speaker is onstage consciously enjoying his own performance as shaman, wizard, showman.

Zodiac has all the material for shamanistic transformations. The main character, Hendrick Marsman, is a hallucinating, half-mad poet-sailor who wants to "relate himself, by means of stars, to the universe."… (p. 411)

But this time Dickey's conjurings fail. The power behind the poetic machinery blinks off, and the transformations never occur. Because there is often very little distance between Dickey and his subject, Marsman never becomes as dramatic as the self-performing speakers of the earlier poems. Often the metaphors are not imaginative juxtapositions but attempts by a drunken narrator to relate himself to anything. And even though Marsman is attempting to recreate a zodiac, the zodiac never becomes a real structure for his personality or imagination…. When last seen, Marsman is writing and/or being firebombed, and the final affirmation of the transcendence of his art seems tacked-on in relation to Marsman's miserable, drunken wanderings throughout the other sections. Nothing in those other scenes justifies a triumph of either Marsman or the universal artist suggested throughout. In general, without the transformative magic of drama and distance, there is a sad exposure of the poet stepping out to admit it's all been just levers and smoke, and willing to give us now an "honest" account of the impossible attempt to transcend pain through language.

The transformations that do go on in Zodiac are mostly those between drunkenness, sleep, and brief periods of sobriety. Using alcoholic spiels as frames for monologues, like using dreams, allows for repetition, illogical apposition, random imagery, and quick shifts of scene. But unlike the dreamer, the drunk is also subject to misinterpretation and misperception of what is really there. Like Lowry in Under the Volcano, Dickey is relying on a belief in moments of drunken clarity and even brilliance, the ability of the drunk to come to realizations he could not have made sober. In a novel the length and scope of Lowry's, it is possible to develop a character who is a lucid and magnificent drunk.

But in Dickey's poem of less than sixty pages, no character equalling the magnificence of the Consul is developed, although Dickey clearly intends to suggest an experience much wider than the historical Marsman's. As critics have pointed out, this is Dickey's most ambitious work, the epic that summarizes the themes of all his early work: the poet as part of history, man as an alien to nature and able to enter it only through the moment of the imagination, and language as the shaman's power against mortality.

Marsman, then, is romanticized as the poet-sailor to the extent that his "craft"—poetry and ship—becomes in the end the death-ship similar to the Anglo-Saxon burial ships for kings…. So the question is whether Marsman's experience as presented by Dickey is, in fact, raised to such heroic stature—that is, if there is justification for such intimate and painful exploration of this speaker's psyche.

Facing the dilemma of how to give this kind of serious, even tragic stature to a character who is a personal and professional failure, Dickey attempts … to identify the "fall" of his character with the decline of western culture during the rise of Fascism and Nazism. But Dickey's background scenes, the European war setting, are only vaguely described. (pp. 412-13)

[The] idea of European decline is never fully developed. (p. 413)

As a poet, Marsman worries aloud frequently about [the] problem of his own perspective and "universality."… [Marsman's questioning] is significant: are his perceptions of himself in the gullies of the world and sky the hallucinations of one drunken artist, or are they symbols of a sustained tragic vision? Is Marsman's failure to "relate himself, through stars, to the universe" the failure of one mad poet or a symbol of what all artists attempt and fail to achieve?

This question is complicated by the dual nature of Marsman's crisis. His struggle for a metaphysical zodiac is therapeutic as well as artistic; he is seeking not just a spiritual framework, but a way to deal with his loneliness, alcoholism, sense of failure, and sense of his approaching death. One way to do this is to see an animistic universe which is dying with the personal self and which is full of symbols, signs, and some degree of empathy.

The constellations are the most obvious "signs," and Marsman is especially obsessed with how they are full of "beasts," animals and monsters that make a "scrambled zoo" similar to his personal zoo of hallucinations…. Unfortunately, the metaphors in Zodiac often … control the poet rather than vice versa.

Essentially, they are personifications, attempts to identify with and humanize the world rather than transform it. The confessional poetry of Sexton uses this technique again and again as a desperate kind of therapy. In Zodiac, these metaphors are sometimes forced or heavyhanded in the struggle to appropriate the external world into the psyche of the speaker. (pp. 414-15)

[Several] times in Zodiac … the appropriateness of the metaphor is clear only in relation to Marsman's undependable perception…. [Many of the metaphors] are equations of Marsman's misery with a more universal misery, but they are also flat assertions rather than conjurations of a credible animism. (pp. 415-16)

Wayne Shumaker suggests in Literature and the Irrational that all metaphor is essentially a belief in or hope for animism. But the personification used in Zodiac shows a shift in Dickey from magic to a kind of psychotherapy, or from lyric celebration to a thinly disguised confessional poetry. Part of this is the fault of the failed distancing device, which is an intermittent third-person narrator whose tone is never clear and who is rather extraneous to what is really Hendrik Marsman's poem. While Dickey at times seems to identify with Marsman wholly, at other times this third-person voice seems straining for objectivity, judgment, even reproach…. [Often] the point of view is ambiguous enough to be either interior monologue or objective description, and this creates a problem in tone. We're sometimes not sure if the perceptions are the results of Marsman's limited vision or alcoholic fantasies, or are descriptions of a setting from a more removed and dependable narrator….

Part of the problem is that the narrator sometimes uses the diction of Marsman, even the drunken diction, and this is a real shift from the historical voice of the opening…. In general, though there are first-person and third-person technical points of view, the voices are identical, and it is difficult to account for the presence of the outside narrator at all. Not only are they identical, but they are not very different in diction and sociology from the speakers in some of Dickey's earlier work. Drunk or sober, Marsman more often comes across as an out-of-shape Southern ex-football player than a Dutch sailor. (p. 416)

In spite of this strained characterization of Marsman, the more important question in the end is whether the poem's form resolves the problems of the speaker. Although the twelve-part division suggests … a "twelfth hour" or end of a cycle, the structure of the poem is actually not a pattern of hours, months, or zodiac signs. It works instead as a looser pattern of drunkenness, ambition, self-reproach, and finally hope. While Marsman is obsessed with the zodiac, it is never actually materialized and never used as a means to structure his imagination. So the kind of resolution in the last section tries to be a closure to a structure and heroic pattern that is never really there. For the last lines of the book make a case for the triumph of Marsman, if not as an individual, then as symbol of a universal artist who might find the "instrument the tuning fork" that can create a music of the spheres which is possible "So long as the hand can hold its island / Of blazing paper, and bleed for its images."

Without the integrity of a justifiable character and a clear structure behind it, the entire last section seems somewhat overwritten…. Throughout, Marsman asserts that poetry for him is a way of reading and writing in the night sky among the constellations. So having the sky literally fall on him can be either tragic or sadly and almost comically ironic. (p. 417)

Zodiac illustrates all the hazards of confessionalism, despite its removed character and setting: the problem of justifying interest in the detailed personal problems of the speaker, the risks of using metaphor as a means of humanizing and appropriating a hostile world, and most of all, the problem of how to make the imagination transcend intense subjectivity so that there is a resolution in the art, if not in the troubled mind, of the poet. (p. 418)