"[The Zodiac] is based on another of the same title by Hendrik Marsman", Dickey explains, and "with the exception of a few lines, is completely my own." "Based" is the warranted word. Part I of Dickey's poem is almost as long (414 lines) as the whole of Marsman's (422), Parts II-XII even longer. But the telling difference grows out of the two conceptions of the hero: "A drunken Dutch poet who returns to his home in Amsterdam after years of travel and tries desperately to relate himself, by means of stars, to the universe."… (p. 120)

[The] two works … are fairly close in story but in other ways vastly apart. Marsman's narrator describes and interprets the hero's thoughts, feelings, acts; he philosophizes, he exclaims—and all in verse of conventional patterns: spare, condensed, restrained. In Dickey's poem the hero himself speaks, moans, shouts, questions, streams with visions, spits out four-letter words...