In 1958, Patchen's "Selected Poems" and his book "When We Were Here Together" received significant praise from the reviewer Frederick Eckman in "Poetry" magazine. Eckman favorably compared Patchen's work to that of the poet William Blake and singled out the poems "Street Corner College," "Do the Dead Know What Time It Is?," "The Origin of Baseball," "Fog," and "The Character of Love Seen As a Search for the Lost" as some of Patchen's best pieces. He called "When We Were Here Together" "a beautiful book, inside and out." However, in the very same issue of "Poetry", the reviewer Robert Beum wrote a brief, negative review of Patchen's book "Hurrah for Anything", calling it dull and clichéd.