In a 1933 talk on "Canadian Poetry in its Relation to The Poetry of England and America",
Charles G. D. Roberts singled out MacDonald as one of three postwar poets representative of modern trends. Roberts said of him: "Wilson MacDonald is purely a lyricist, with a very wide range of form and theme. His best work is forged in the white heat of emotion and is always definitely stamped with his own personality. It is primarily
subjective. In his shorter, personal lyrics, such as 'Exit,' he achieves at times an unforgettable poignancy. In his passionately humanitarian poems he is modem in spirit, but in form he is distinctly classical." (
Italics in original.) The
Encyclopedia of Literature praised technical aspects of MacDonald's poetry "The poems are invariably well balanced because of his musical interest; parts of stanzas are repeated for emphasis and direction — as major melodies in music would be — with other lines juxtaposed to heighten the emotional effect." Fetherling was frankly dismissive: "It is surprising the extent to which MacDonald was often taken seriously as an artist and equally surprising that genuine poems or hints of them can sometimes be discovered in his collections by those willing to wade through his vapid
romanticism and pre-
modernist conventions." Some of MacDonald's poetry certainly does not hold up: for example, the books
Caw-Caw Ballads and
Paul Marchand and Other Poems, which employ dialect verse – here the French-Canadian habitant dialect of English popularized by
William Henry Drummond – more entertaining if heard performed rather than read, and even then more embarrassing than entertaining. Other pieces of MacDonald's work stand the test of time. The title poem of his collection
Out of the Wilderness has something of the strength of Walt Whitman – "I, a vagabond, gypsy, lover forever of freedom, / Come, / Come to you who are arrogant, proud, and fevered with civilization – / Come with a tonic of sunlight, bottled in wild careless acres,/ To cure you with secrets as old as the breathing of men." Roberts said of that poem that MacDonald "has been so bold as to experiment frankly with Whitman's peculiar form and content, and he has justified the experiment. He has succeeded at times in breathing into that harsh form a beauty of words and cadences which Whitman never achieved". ==Recognition==