In the following essay, Flint surveys Carruth's body of work, paying particular attention to The Sleeping Beauty and Working Papers.

In the following essay, Weissman surveys Carruth's critical works, concluding: "[Carruth's progress has taken him continuously deeper into the knowledge of his own humanity, and of the humanity of literature."]

In the following essay, Swiss surveys several of Carruth's collections of poetry and criticism and lauds the author for his technical skill and his earnest and straightforward approach in both genres.

In the following excerpt from his introduction to his Effluences from the Sacred Caves, Carruth reflects on philosophy and literature and discusses his approach to writing.

Few poets have been as social … as W. B. Yeats; few have been as essentially solitary as Hayden Carruth. But like Yeats in his Tower, Carruth has for years rooted his poetry in the primary realism of place: in his case "a country laborer's / holding, fourteen acres 'more or less'" in the bottom of Foote Brook Gulf in northern Vermont. The difference in local altitude points to a major difference in attitude: Yeats, from the beginning, looked down on the changes that...

Hoey is a poet, educator, and critic who regularly writes the "Year in Poetry" essay for the CLC Yearbook. In the following review of Collected Shorter Poems, 1946–1991, he provides a positive assessment of the collection, commenting: "[This volume demonstrates what some readers have long known: Hayden Carruth possesses greater range of style, scope of subject, and diversity of formal skills than any other poet working in the United States today."]

Mitchell is an American poet, educator, and critic. In the following review, he applauds the skill with which Carruth employs a variety of voices and themes in If You Call This Cry a Song.

The following excerpt is from Faulkner's laudatory review of Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands.

In the following review of The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth, Shaw remarks: "Warts and all, this is a collection animated by a seriousness of purpose, a vocational commitment which few poets nowadays can match."

Tillinghast is an American poet, educator, and critic. In the following excerpt from a review of Collected Shorter Poems, 1946–1991, he asserts: "Something Hayden Carruth does as well as any living writer is to treat the reader as a friend, and to provide, through his poetry, hours of good company."

Porter is an American novelist, educator, and critic. In the following mixed review of Working Papers, he faults some of Carruth's essays as "glib and naive," but lauds the author's ability to write about poetry "with modesty, intelligence, and generosity."

Nordell is an American journalist, editor, and critic. In the following review, he determines that Sitting In provides "an uneven performance with a number of fine, thought-provoking moments."

Bruckner is an American journalist, editor, and critic. In the following review, he provides a positive assessment of Working Papers.

Hayden Carruth's mottled document, The Bloomingdale Papers, opens with an appropriately horrifying apologia in prose that works: "Part of my illness was a need to do what I was told (in anger and under protest), so I did it. One of my doctors suggested that since I called myself a writer I should write something that might be helpful to him and his colleagues in their consideration of my case …" This, then, is a form of prison poetry, a genre we must not deprecate since … ...

Hayden Carruth's beautiful "To Artemis" … is a poem of formal address to the moon goddess…. The poem is dignified, sharply perceived, thoughtful, translucent, and reverent. It is in free verse with irregular sections. Carruth has a good and practiced ear, and has worked in accentual-syllabic meters as well as free verse. The following passage is exciting in motion, sound, interworkings:           &#...

More a document than a poem, The Bloomingdale Papers is a meditation on the several months of lost time Hayden Carruth spent in a mental institution during the early 1950s. It was written in conditions of extreme isolation: on a typewriter, in the ward, as the author's way of helping his doctors to understand him. Now it is offered, out of context, to the "candid reader" of a different age, who can know little of the peculiar and personal circumstances that gave it a more than clinical ...

Somewhere between Robert Frost's pastoral skepticism and Mikhail Bakunin's trust in historical progress, Hayden Carruth makes his way [in "Brothers, I Loved You All"]. He is, finally, a moralist, as this volume's long center piece, "Vermont," shows. He doesn't trust the difference between the contemporary and archaic…. For Mr. Carruth there is "more warmth and far less vanity" in his neighbor's greeting than there is in �...

[Brothers, I Loved You All: Poems 1969–1977 clamors] for attention, in its richness and variety, in its burly energy, in its courage and gusto. His poems have a sureness to them, a flair and variety; they are the work of an old craftsman. Yet, in their dedication to finding an equilibrium in an alien and often cruel landscape, Vermont, where the poet has dug himself in, they reflect the moods and struggles of a man never at rest. His defeats have generated his epiphanies, and he passes on to us a cer...

[Brothers, I Loved You All: Poems 1969–1977] is simply superb. Carruth gets better as he gets older because he has not stopped caring—for the poem or for the world. "Paragraphs," the concluding poem in this volume, consists of 28 16-line stanzas. It ends celebrating the recording of "Bottom Blues" in 1944, having gotten there from the Campground Road in Carruth's Vermont. How it got there is the poem, and makes it major—a term I don't use loosel...