Kilmer is considered among the last of the Romantic era poets because his verse is conservative and traditional in style and do not break any of the formal rules of poetics — a style often criticized today for being too sentimental to be taken seriously . The entire corpus of Kilmer 's work was produced between 1909 and 1918 when Romanticism and sentimental lyric poetry fell out of favor and Modernism took root — especially with the influence of the Lost Generation . In the years after Kilmer 's death , poetry went in drastically different directions , as is seen in the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound , and academic criticism grew with it to eschew the more sentimental and straightforward verse .