[In the following review of The Zodiac, French notes that Dickey's ambitious poem is deeply flawed and improperly realized.]

James Dickey's reputation as a writer has grown in the past ten years. In fact, Dickey has lately become a highly visible public figure as well. Within the past two years his poetic productivity and presence has not diminished. In that period he has published The Zodiac, written the text to In God's Image, and graced the ritual occasion of Jimmy Carter's inauguration. As a poet, James Dickey is not undeserving of the recognition he has now achieved. Yet at least one of Dickey's latest offerings, The Zodiac, does not demonstrate the strength of much of the earlier verse.

The Zodiac is by far Dickey's most ambitious effort to compose a long and major poem. In the headnote he describes Zodiac as a poem “based on another by the same title” (p. 7) by the Dutch poet, Hendrik Marsman. Dickey discounts his work as translation; instead, “it is a story of a drunken and perhaps dying Dutch poet who returns to his home … and tries desperately to relate himself to the universe.” It is in this mode that Dickey presents Marsman and transforms him into a symbolic vehicle. One is not surprised, then, to see Marsman's tragic life in terms of a self-conscious examination of the poetic process.

The Zodiac ends with a proclamation that the generative “tuning fork” of the universe:

                    shall vibrate through the western world
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.

[P. 62]

For a poem that rarely breaks free of the tortured syntax of Dickey's insane and drunken protagonist, these last lines are amazingly coherent. It seems to be Dickey's point that while “bleeding … for images” one can gain eloquence as well as grace. The basic concept is a familiar one—the poet is akin to outcast, madman, or prophet. Ever since Coleridge, the literary world has seen an array of sensitive and suffering wanderers. Dickey maintains the image of the Mariner through Marsman, substitutes a “tuning fork” for the animating force of the Aeolian Harp, and an ambiguous sexual tragedy in Marsman's past takes the place of the murdered albatross (sec. 9). It would be unfair to condemn Dickey for the display of what may indeed be central mythic elements, but his use of Romantic themes and images is often cloyingly obvious. For example, Dickey represents Marsman's alcoholism and obsession with death in a descent motif. While Marsman is suffering from delirium tremens, the narrator states:

                                                  —god-damn it, he can't quit,
But—listen to me—how can he rise
                                                  When he's digging? Digging through the smoke
Of distance, throwing columns around to find …
He's drunk again.

[P. 40]

This passage demonstrates the extent to which the “bleeding” poet can be reduced to cliché. For Dickey, Marsman's message was that one shouldn't “shack up with the intellect,” yet to “conceive with meat / Alone” is to doom the “child” (p. 47). Thus the struggle for the marriage of heaven and hell, mind and heart continues. This modern sense of alienation is brought to a climax when, in the face of the “expanding Universe,” Marsman “can't tell Europe / From his own Death” (p. 39). Like these examples, the language repeatedly strikes one as banal and unimaginative.

Obviously, Dickey had great ambitions in the creation of the poem. But for this reviewer the goals of the poem are never successfully realized. One is never sure whether the erratic syntax and abrupt alterations in speaker, time, and voice simply parallel and reflect the mental state of Marsman. There is the temptation to judge Dickey's verse as haphazardly constructed or flawed. It is also difficult to determine the correlation between the Zodiac and the structure of the poem. The poem's twelve sections seem more convenient than functional. As a type, The Zodiac does have precedents. Don Finkel's Adequate Earth, Warren's Audubon: A Vision, and Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet are all examples of successful mixtures of the historical, psychological, and mythic. Dickey's predicament in The Zodiac, though, may be a result of his own poetic theorizing. In Babel to Byzantium, Dickey wrote that he was gaining interest “in the conclusionless poem, the open or ungeneralizing poem, the un-well-made poem.” While The Zodiac is neither “conclusionless” or “ungeneralizing,” it is certainly “un-well-made.”

If Dickey is now at the popular zenith of his career, his audience can expect his publishers to capitalize on the marketability of his name. I hope, though, that our unofficial poet laureate does not allow more works like The Zodiac to reach the public in third-rate condition.