of the public response to Patchen's work when it was initially published. For instance, Patchen biographer Larry Smith notes that "[the] initial reception to Patchen's First Will & Testament was positive and strong." Smith notes that a reviewer from the New Republic compared the book to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The book was also praised in reviews by Louis Untermeyer and John Peale Bishop. However, it received a notably negative review by Delmore Schwartz in Partisan Review. Following this first negative review, Schwartz would remain one of Patchen's fiercest critics. In response to Patchen's novel The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941), prior to its publication, Henry Miller praised the work in the long essay Patchen: Man of Anger and Light, which was published in book form in 1946. Also prior to the book's publication, Delmore Schwartz read the manuscript and claimed to be so offended by its controversial antiwar stance that he persuaded Patchen's publisher, New Directions, against publishing it. This forced Patchen to self-publish the book by subscription. Post-publication, the book's supporters included Miller, Robert Duncan, and James Laughlin; its detractors included Schwartz, Edmund Wilson, and Anaïs Nin. Despite receiving a favorable review from William Carlos Williams in 1942, the novel's highly experimental style, limited release, and antiwar stance would guarantee it a very limited audience. In 1943, Patchen's Cloth of the Tempest received largely negative reviews. One reviewer even accused Patchen of being "naive," a common criticism aimed at his work, particularly regarding his fervent pacifist beliefs. In the 1950s, Patchen received praise from the jazz critic Ralph Gleason for his jazz-poetry readings with the Chamber Jazz Sextet at the Blackhawk Club in San Francisco. Gleason wrote, "I think [Patchen's reading] technique presents the possibilities of an entire new medium of expression―a combination of jazz and poetry that would take nothing away from either form but would create something entirely new." When Patchen recorded his jazz-poetry readings, one of the resulting albums drew praise from the poet John Ciardi, who wrote that "Patchen's poetry is in many ways a natural for jazz accompaniment. Its subject and its tone are close to those of jazz." In 1958, Patchen's Selected Poems and his book When We Were Here Together received significant praise from the reviewer Frederick Eckman in Poetry magazine. Eckman favorably compared Patchen's work to that of the poet William Blake and singled out the poems "Street