In a review of the book for "The New Yorker", the poet Louise Bogan characterized Lowell's style as "a high pitch of baroque intensity" and compared his writing to the work of John Donne and Herman Melville, adding that " literary gifts are of a special kind." She singled out for praise the poems "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" and "At the Indian Killer's Grave" as well as Lowell's loose translations, specifically, "The Ghost" (after Sextus Propertius) and "The Fens" (after William Cobbett).