It is wholly proper that Padraic Colum is best known as poet, for his poems are his most significant contribution to literature…. To dismiss Colum's style as merely straightforward, accurate, or simple, as many critics have done, is to do the craftsmanship of the poetry a considerable disservice. The way Colum says things is very often beautiful and his poetic scenes and the characters as delightful as they are unassuming and familiar. His language is unpretentious and his verse forms are predominantly lyrical and rhyming with heavily accentuated iambs and tripping anapests, the sort of poems that on first reading tend to inspire song rather than thought…. I suspect the forthrightness of the poet's style has been the principal cause of the dearth of literary criticism about his poetry, since the fashionable critics are now more explicative than descriptive.
Colum's subject matter and conclusions reflect the same directness. His subjects are generally common people and common sights, commemorated without bravado in their own language and terms. (p. 25)
