SOURCE: Morris, Harry. “A Formal View of the Poetry of Dickey, Garrigue, and Simpson.” Sewanee Review 77, no. 2 (April 1969): 318-22.

In the following excerpt, Morris provides a negative assessment of Poems, 1957-1967, calling the poems in the volume dull, awkward, and stylistically inferior.

James Dickey, Jean Garrigue, and Louis Simpson are ready apparently for an assessment of their work to date; for each poet, the current book is a selection from all his past work plus a final section containing new poems.

Traditionally we have expected poets to develop their powers of observation, to give form to their utterance; to be concise and precise, to seek a verbal music, and to enrich the texture of their verse with the devices of rhetoric. In Mr. Dickey's verse [in Poems, 1957-1967] I find the observation myopic, sometimes filmed completely over; form is adhered to but so meaninglessly or inexactly as to...