Devoted admirers included Robert Creeley, William Gass, Wendell Berry, Guy Davenport, Howard Zinn, and Bruce Olds.
[3][4][5] Metcalf's work draws on a wide range of material, including history, anthropology and folklore, travel narratives, geography, Indian lore, geology, and physiology.
His earliest works used common fictional devices (storyline, characterization, dialogue), but soon Metcalf began pushing past such conventions.
His novel Genoa (1965), subtitled "A Telling of Wonders," is a portrait of two physically deformed brothers, one a vagabond / murderer, and the other, a mediocre doctor and the narrator of the story.
The writer Guy Davenport described Genoa as being a "built" thing: "an architecture of analogies, similitudes, and Melvillean metaphor.
These elements, what the poet Donald Byrd refers to as "immense rhymes," are the building blocks of Metcalf's books.
"[7] Metcalf quotes a remark of Edgar Allan Poe as it applies to his own work, "To originate, is carefully, patiently, and understandingly to combine."
[10] His papers from 1917 to 1999 are held in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.