SOURCE: Carroll, Paul. “James Dickey as Critic.” Chicago Review 20 (November 1968): 82-7.

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...