Critics have had opposing views about Richard Wilbur’s poetry since the start of his career, mostly disagreeing about the success of his style. Other poets who appeared in the 1940s and 1950s flaunted tradition and tried to impress readers with originality. Wilbur, on the other hand, always worked within conventional forms. Even the critics who found his work sterile and thought that he sacrificed meaning for the sake of style commended his work for its craftsmanship. As John B. Hougen explains it in his book Ecstasy Within Discipline: The Poetry of Richard Wilbur: “It is no doubt Wilbur’s reliance on traditional poetic forms in an era when they were out of fashion that muted the praise of his work in some quarters and in others gave rise to blatantly negative criticism.” The critics who found Wilbur’s work too stiff and formal did not see that his experiments within formality were just as daring as those by poets who flaunted formal rules.

One review from 1956, written by Horace Gregory, praises Wilbur’s talent while at the same time represents him as a writer of his time. In “The Poetry of Suburbia” published in Partisan Review, Gregory identifies Wilbur’s place among other contemporary poets but says that, like many of them, he has nothing very new to offer the world. He compares Wilbur’s poetry to the kind of “magazine verse” that was published in the New Yorker forty years earlier: light, witty verse that was popular in the growing suburbs precisely because it was so insubstantial. He compares particular poems from Things of the World to forgotten works by T. S. Eliot and Phelps Putnam, noting that, “In contrast to Putnam’s, Wilbur’s poem is overdressed and a shade pretentious—and his phrase, ‘God keep me a damned fool,’ rings false, false because Wilbur seems so expert at contriving certain of his lines.”

Even though some critics find Wilbur to be a poet with limited imagination, he has always had ardent supporters among critics and fellow poets. The book in which “Merlin Enthralled” was published, Things of the World, won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for the year it was published, just a few of the dozens of awards presented to Wilbur throughout his long career. He is such an influential writer that a book-length study of his poetry was published in 1967, just twenty years after the publication of Wilbur’s first collection. In his book Richard Wilbur, Donald L. Hill analyzes “Merlin Enthralled,” finding it to be “beyond a doubt one of his finest poems.” Lauding it for being able to say things often left unsaid, Hill concludes his analysis by noting that “there is a spaciousness about the poem, a fullness of expression and a harmony among the parts, that are the marks of a masterpiece.” While Hill is generally favorable to Wilbur’s work, such ardent praise for an individual piece is rare.

Over the years, Wilbur became established as one of America’s most accomplished poets and one of the most reliable. The old controversy about his formal style masking a lack of spirit faded as critics accepted him on his own terms. By the time his New and Collected Poems was published in 1989, several of Wilbur’s translations of French dramas had been performed on Broadway and had become standard English-language versions; he had published over twenty books of poetry, children’s verse, and literary criticism; and he had served as the poet laureate of the United States.