SOURCE: "Mr. Cullen's First Book," in Poetry, Vol. 28, No. 1, April, 1926, pp. 50-3.

In the following review of Color, Dillon notes the tendency of Cullen's verse to become "stilted and prosy" and finds the poet most successful when he is "spare and direct. "

This first volume of musical verses [Color] offers promise of distinction for its author, shows him to be a young poet of uncommon earnestness and diligence. Serious purpose and careful work are apparent in all of his poems. One feels that he will cultivate his fine talent with intelligence, and reap its full harvest. He has already developed a lyric idiom which is not, perhaps, very unusual or striking in itself, but which he has learned to employ with considerable virtuosity. To be sure, the many elements which have entered that reservoir below the threshold of his consciousness have undergone as yet no thorough chemistry. But...