[8][9][10] American essayist Emile Capouya called "The Lordly Hudson" the greatest New York poem since Walt Whitman.

The poem, wrote Capouya, represents Goodman's direct, unsophisticated rhetorical style, which pulls from staid virtues like patriotism.

[12] To critic Kingsley Widmer, Goodman's eccentric mannerisms overshadowed its emphasis on the Hudson as a place or experience.

[13] Poet Judson Jerome laughed aloud reading the title lyric for the first time and was surprised to realize that Goodman meant it seriously.

[14] What made the poem great, said Gordon Burnside for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was Goodman's "patriotic love ... underneath its kidding and fooling".

[8] Goodman continually revised his poems[15] and edited "The Lordly Hudson" in the weeks before his death in 1972 on his return home from teaching in Hawaii.

[5] The result is lyrical and dramatic, with arching, high emotion intervals and "supple melodic phrases" recalling the Hudson River's grandeur atop a "strong rhythmic chordal accompaniment".

[4] A Singer's Guide to the American Art Song described Rorem's composition as matching the urgency and nobility in Goodman's original poem.

[9] The Macmillan Company published The Lordly Hudson: Collected Poems in October 1962, with a paperback to follow three months later.

[38] Poet Harvey Shapiro wrote that the poetry in The Lordly Hudson, Goodman's first solo collection, was "the purest version of his thought ... always serviceable, sometimes awkward ... by rips and starts brilliant.

"[1] Jerome, on the other hand, found the collection mired in "awkwardness, wordiness, and pointless toying" and that Goodman's attitude comes across in themes of "indiscriminate sexuality, ... admiration for power and shock, plainness and simple pleasures, and an ego throbbing like swollen flesh".

[14] Poet Denise Levertov considered Goodman's poems to be on par with his short stories, which she said were among America's greatest.