Wheelock's development has been slow and sometimes painful; in his determination not to succumb to the whims of fashion, he has sometimes seemed to move backward instead of forward. But in his later years he finally wrote a number of poems which are worth all the trouble, and which are not diminished by the lesser poems [By Daylight and In Dream: New and Selected Poems]….

[This volume] contains, in roughly chronological order, all the poems which Wheelock wishes to preserve. The collection is weighted in favor of relatively recent work…. (p. 460)

But even though vast numbers of early poems have been left behind, those which remain are enough to suggest the difficulties which plagued the young poet. He wrote, for one thing, with incredible haste—he published sizeable collections in 1911, 1912, 1913, 1919, 1922, 1927, and 1936—and so must often have failed to see how little of this verse was his own, and how much of it was a pastiche of early favorites such as Henley, Whitman, and Wordsworth. There are whole poems here which seem to have been written by the ghost of an anonymous nineteenth-century voice…. (pp. 460-61)

But even as Wheelock continued to pour out volumes of this kind of work, he gradually increased his command over formal and structural elements, so that even bad poems began to reveal arresting musical and rhythmical details, as in this final stanza from "Translation":

         Now, as you read these verses—from afar,
         This very moment, from this printed rhyme,
         I cry to you out of the wheels of Time,
         I call to you across the morning-star.

The arrangement of stresses and vowel-sounds is more artfully controlled here, and arouses some pleasure, still too slight to overcome the sentimental and derivative phrases; but the control and the pleasure are there, and are the foundation for the good poems Wheelock came to write in his late sixties. (p. 461)

Whatever the reasons, there is no doubt that Wheelock's later work is a great improvement over the earlier; the improvement is especially remarkable when we realize that no radical shift occurred in thematic or formal preoccupations. The later poems grow naturally out of the earlier ones, pursuing the same themes of love, death, and the tragic nature of life; they move in the same traditional forms. But their voice is distinctively Wheelock's own. (pp. 461-62)

The profound change in Wheelock's poetry has been wrought by comparatively slight adjustments in the earlier style. Some phrases here still border on triteness, but they have been absorbed into a distinctive, controlled, and dateless voice. Old ideas restated with a minimum of idiosyncrasy are hard to work into poems, but Wheelock manages to do so regularly and memorably….

Among the best of [the poems presented is] the title poem of this collection ["By Daylight and In Dream"]…. In three long sections of blank verse, the speaker confronts his impending death, made more poignant by the remnants of his past, which lie all around him. Wheelock has wisely avoided trying to resolve the vast questions which suggest themselves in the course of his meditation. At certain moments, he looks toward the possibility of eternal life, and at other moments he accepts the finality of death, celebrating the holiness of earth, "the graveyard of the self-effacing dead". The poem concludes with a dream in which various voices offer various answers to the question of what follows death; but the speaker is still living at the end of the poem, and there is a strong suggestion that the importance of the future still lies this side of the grave. A small formal detail underscores this notion; the blank-verse line is broken between the end of one section and the beginning of another, and the third section ends with a short line. It has not been filled out, which hints that there is more to come, not of this poem, but of the stuff of which it is made.

Wheelock has at last written his share of fine poems, and they are all here; and there is extra pleasure to be gained from respect for [his] perseverance … and from the realization that Wheelock, at eighty-five, continues to contemplate his future work. (p. 463)