Although critics have ignored "The War Against the Trees," they have not ignored Selected Poems, the volume in which it appears. In 1958, poet and critic David Wagoner wrote that the eighty-five poems in Selected Poems "exhibit a simultaneously delightful and frightening mind. Its ways are intricate, surprising, and clear; but they occasionally lead so deep or so far forward that the reader performing Pound's 'dance along the intellect' discovers himself in a country where he is his own most dangerous enemy, where he is forced to choose sides at the bottom of his own mind." In the case of "The War Against the Trees," that choice might refer to the tough one between nature and development. Nine years later, Jean H. Hagstrum remarked that "the latest poems (which include "The War Against the Trees") make the old metaphysical boldness even bolder and intensify the already unparaphrasable...