SOURCE: Mizejewski, Linda. “Shamanism Toward Confessionalism: James Dickey, Poet.” Georgia Review 32 (summer 1978): 409-19.

In the following essay, Mizejewski explores the confessional poetry of The Zodiac, focusing on Dickey's poetic persona.

Since the mid-sixties or so, one or two people at almost any English Department cocktail party have had a James Dickey story. Perhaps even more amazing than the stories themselves has been Dickey's mercurial quality that renders an anecdote from nearly every college reading and from so many personal encounters. After 1972, the stories became Jim Dickey-Burt Reynolds stories, and after January, 1977, there were tales from Carter's inaugural, but by then they were appearing in popular news magazines. Developing as a celebrity-poet, Dickey has broken from the university circuits of rumors and readings, and materialized in middle-class living rooms—in glossy coffeetable books and on the television screen, where he is likely to be reciting from his Biblical prose-poetry...