He considered himself a poet above all, claiming that he had never written a novel but instead had expanded poetic intuition about a subject using prose. He was frequently praised for his poetic style, particularly in his short stories. In 1912, for instance, Frederic T. Cooper wrote that "in the earlier Maurice Hewlett we have the chief living champion of purely romantic fiction, and a stylist of the first order, whose cadenced prose is a delight to the ear, whose verbal colour has the gleam of many jewels, and who has given us at least two novels and many short stories which the epicures of literature will not willingly allow to die."
Nevertheless, unlike Hardy's reputation, Hewlett's was already in decline in 1912, and Hewlett has retained neither his readership nor much critical interest. As Samuel Hynes has more recently pointed out, in ironic deflation of Hewlett's hopes of leading the twentieth century, he "was a man who came at the end of a tradition in everything he did.
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