Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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“ [233] Deific,” or affected and feeble, as “Eidolons.” One of the most curiously unAmerican traits in a poet professedly so patriotic is his way of employing foreign, and especially French words, to a degree that recalls the fashionable novels of the last generation, and gives an incongruous effect comparable only to Theodore Parker's description of an African chief seen by some one at Sierra Leone: “With the exception of a dress-coat, his Majesty was as naked as a pestle.”

Of all our poets, he is really the least simple, the most meretricious; and this is the reason why the honest consciousness of the classes which he most celebrates — the drover, the teamster, the soldier — has never been reached by his songs. He talks of labor as one who had never really labored; his Drum Taps proceed from one who has never personally responded to the tap of the drum. He has something of the turgid wealth, the rather self-conscious amplitude, of Victor Hugo, and much of his broad, vague, indolent desire for the welfare of the whole human race; but he has none of Hugo's structural power, his dramatic or at least melodramatic instinct, and his occasionally terse and brilliant condensation.