Bettina L. Knapp writes that War is Kind is a both a gloomy and an emotionally charged collection of  poems "replete with scenes of martyrdom and bone-hard metaphors." Knapp writes: "Despair, a morbid presence, permeates the world as individuals are forced to endure the agony of war." Knapp calls the title poem of the collection "one of the most extraordinary war poems of all time." Commenting on the historical reception of Crane's poetry in his book-length study of Crane's verse, Daniel Hoffman observes that "Crane's critics have often asserted that his verse did not develop at all. Such critics apparently have been content to regard as typical of his second book the nine or ten poems which correspond in method to those of the first." Hoffman, however, disagrees with these critics, claiming that Crane's poetry had indeed evolved from The Black Riders to War is...