SOURCE: "The Odyssey of Hayden Carruth," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring-Summer, 1983, pp. 17-32.

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

For at least two decades Hayden Carruth has been a poet of the first quality, no mythmaker or trend-setter in matters of style but a writer so well endowed with character, courage, stamina, honesty, and independence as to make whatever styles he has adopted or adapted peculiarly his own. He has also been a quirky anthologist (The Voice That Is Great Within Us), an occasional reviewer, and a writer of essays sometimes marked by a distinct evangelical fervor. Unlike one of his poetic stepfathers, Robert Frost, who spent his first eight years in California, he is a pure-bred Yankee, raised by an old-fashioned radical journalist in the town of Litchfield, Connecticut, that...