His greatest danger is a certain expectedness of diction. . . . Still, this second collection of his poems again proves him one of our most serious, able and distinguished voices. The book has a passionate quality, an intense clarity, a lensing of the totality of being into a kind of carefully separated madness that makes it one of the remarkable books of the decade. If you like to read and talk and argue about modern poetry in general, you will find James Dickey's collection of brief reviews and essays a very satisfying and provoking volume. It is astonishing, however, that a book about the south could be written in the seventies that does not mention the black struggle for freedom . . .
Dickey is one of the most intelligent poet-critics in the business. . . .
It is, for better and worse, very much a poet's novel . . . He prefers the quieter spiritual poetry of Harvey Shapiro. This profile of Dickey was written shortly after he began his duties as the 1966-67 poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, a position similar to that of poet laureate. This is Miss Moore's first book of poems since 1959, and it is probably the finest of them all. . . . The best of Lindsay's poetry seems to me unique, its innocence not only real but unified and valuable.