[Wheelock] was a classicist, and his poems came from the conviction that poetry releases human emotion when it is most compressed by the medium of form. One of his best poems, dedicated to his father and titled "The Gardener," passionately and quietly emphasizes that his father took the way of the artist and laid his gardens out according to strict order, so that the beauty of vegetable foliage would be related to the human mind:

   Truly, your labors have not been in vain;
   These woods, these walks, these gardens—everywhere
   I look, the glories of your love remain.
   Therefore, for you, now beyond praise or prayer,
   Before the night falls that shall make us one,
   In which neither of us will know or care,
   This kiss, father, from him who was your son.

It is a wonderful poem, written in terza rima, the great rhythm of Dante, and is an inspired example of the relationship that John Hall Wheelock held between himself, his craft, his world and his father. (pp. 14, 56)

[Wheelock] began with his large, innocent heart as a rather shameless sentimentalist. The early work is good, the kind of thing that one can accede to after a couple of beers. The rhythms are somewhat in the manner of Swinburne, and there is a heavy cast of the fin de siècle over these early poems…. In these lush and almost mawkish verses, an unerring sense of timing is evident, which is, even though employed in such sentimental and period-ridden themes, unusual and interesting…. Wheelock, though his lyricism deepened over the years, became increasingly moving, in the manner of a man no longer interested in Swinburnian Romanticism but involved far more profoundly in the meaning of his own existence: his past, his family, the landscapes that had surrounded him over the years of his long life, and a very noble coming-to-terms with the intolerable burden of memory….

Anyone who cares for the human imagination should read the beautifully cadenced poems of this compassionate, talented and peacefully creative man. We should be privileged to join him, in his own words, "in the wilderness of heaven." (p. 56)