In “Songs Among The Ruins,” an essay that he published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1965, the English poet and critic Ian Hamilton wrote:
In the best works of poets like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath one finds not just a cerebral attempt for the distinguishably United States idiom but an impassioned exploration of whatever chances the imagination still has of making sense of a civilization that is bent on self-destruction, that cruelly cannot fail to involve the poet in its manic processes but demands also that he survive as guardian of what is being killed; to these poets America is distinct from other societies in the sense that it is more efficiently dehumanizing, having abused its promise as it now prepares to abuse its power, and the best that they feel able to attempt is to oppose its abstracting pressures with the full weight of whatever in their own lives seems concretely worth saving.