Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics at the beginning of his career, Lowell wrote rigorously formal and dense poetry that won him praise for his exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme.

For instance, in "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket", the best-known poem from the book, Lowell wrote the following:The bones cry for the blood of the white whale, the fat flukes arch and whack about its ears, the death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears the gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail, and hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags and rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags,

Both Land of Unlikeness and Lord Weary's Castle were influenced by Lowell's conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.

However, one big difference between these two books is that, in Lord Weary's Castle, Lowell tempers the severe religiosity that characterized many of the poems in Land of Unlikeness.

In characterizing the book's overarching thematic concerns, Randall Jarrell wrote: The poems understand the world as a sort of conflict of opposites.

Into this realm of necessity the poems push everything that is closed, turned inward, incestuous, that blinds or binds: the Old Law, imperialism, militarism, capitalism, Calvinism, Authority, the Father, the "proper Bostonians," the rich who will "do everything for the poor except get off their backs."

"[8] 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).