“Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” is a small poem and mostly overlooked by critics who reviewed Silence in the Snowy Fields or who study Bly’s poetry. William V. Davis in Understanding Robert Bly contends that Bly’s voice is most “authentic” in this collection and for that reason it is his “most important book.” In noting that most reviewers praised the collection, Richard P. Sugg, in his introduction to Bly’s prose and poetry Robert Bly, claims that the book contains what he calls “the enduring basis of Bly’s work[:] . . . . the psychological theme of man’s inward life and the act of perception/discovery necessary to connect with and develop it.” Ronald Moran and George S. Lensing, in their study of Bly and his peers, Four Poets and the Emotive Imagination: Robert Bly, James Wright, Louis Simpson, and William Stafford, conclude, “The poems of Silence in the Snowy Fields are very much of a world” in their treatment of landscape and the small moments in a person’s life. Noting the “bare statements” of “Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter,” and poems like it in the collection, Howard Nelson, in Robert Bly: An Introduction, speculates that a first reading of the book is “likely to be a mysterious or mystifying experience” for readers. Nelson points out some of the reservations critics have with the poems, most notably their lack of sophistication and “intellectual density.” However, he argues:

While it is the simplicity and quiet of Silence in the Snowy Fields that first strike the reader, the book was a key contribution to that period of great restlessness, energy, and originality in American poetry that began in the 1950s and continued through the 1960s.

Silence in the Snowy Fields remains one of the best-selling poetry titles in Wesleyan University Press’s catalogue, forty years after its publication.