It is considered one of Stevens' more challenging and "difficult"[3] works, and a 20th-century example of the English Romantic tradition.

[4] According to critic Harold Bloom, it is Stevens' only major poem "in which he allows himself to enter in his proper person, as a kind of dramatic figure.

"[5] On this reading, the poem comes to an early climax at the end of canto VI, where Stevens describes a tension between his own imagination and a disintegrative and elusive reality, his subject: This is nothing until in a single man contained, Nothing until this named thing nameless is And is destroyed.

The scholar of one candle sees An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame Of everything he is.

[6] Another notable poem in the book is "The Owl in the Sarcophagus", an elegy for Stevens' best friend, Henry Church.