the poems, the poet's sensitiveness to the beauty of common experiences, and her compact and imaginative expression of them". However, Monroe did express some reserve, seeing "nothing strikingly original" in the collection. Monroe thought "Nancy Hanks", a poem about the birth of Abraham Lincoln to Nancy Hanks Lincoln, was the "most ambitious poem in the book". A New York Times review of Plain-Chant for America: Poems and Ballads (1942), although it compared Chapin's work favorably with that of e e cummings, criticized her for a perceived lack of "sensibility":As in the case of John Peale Bishop, her poetry will augment the sphere of your sentiments without modifying your sensibility. Katharine Chapin has an ideology … but lacks a sufficient volume of texture in her technique to give her work the dualism of images and logical substance which makes for major poetry. … Katharine Chapin has in the main an ideology without a private sensibility to give her scope varied dimensions.A review in Poetry of Chapin's last collection The Other Journey (1959), advanced a similarly lukewarm assessment: Seriousness and technical competence, even together, do not necessarily sustain one's interest in a group of poems. Katherine Garrison Chapin's The Other Journey makes that quite clear. It is hard to find anything actually wrong with the book except that it is not particularly exciting. … The whole book is curiously lacking in personal impact … Robert Hillyer, however, reviewing The Other Journey in The New York Times, said it showed an "easy lyric grace" and "unobstructed communication". Turner, in a biographical sketch, writes that "in poetic technique [Chapin] is barely influenced by the modernist poets. Her lyrics are chiefly in rhyme and meter, controlled but not exceptionally tight or brilliant, and in no way innovative". The Academy of American Poets nominated Chapin for the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1975. The nomination was endorsed by several senators and Nelson Rockefeller, the Vice President of the United States, but she was ultimately not selected for the honor. Drama Chapin's play Sojourner Truth, about the early years of the historical figure of the same name, was produced by the American Negro Theater in 1948. It was directed by Osceola Macarthy Adams (by then known as Osceola Archer) and starred Muriel Smith. According to a lecture by Josephine Jacobsen, Sojourner Truth "ran for many weeks in Harlem". Works Criticism Drama The Tapestry of the Duchess (play,