old heartbreaks and love songs, ghostly distillations of fragrances all too familiar". Aiken characterized Kilmer as a "dabbler in the pretty and sweet" and "pale-mouthed clingers to the artificial and archaic". Kilmer is considered among the last of the Romantic era poets because his verse is conservative and traditional in style and does 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. The poem was criticized by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their textbook Understanding Poetry first published in 1938. Brooks and Warren were two of the major contributors to the New Criticism movement. New Criticism proponents analyzed poetry on its aesthetic formulae and excluded reader's response, the author's intention, historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis. They attributed the popularity of "Trees" largely to its religious appeal and believed it was a "stock response that has nothing to do, as such, with poetry", adding: It praises God and appeals to a religious sentiment. Therefore, people who do not stop to look at the poem itself or to study the images in the poem and think about what the poem really says, are inclined to accept the poem because of the pious sentiment, the prettified little pictures (which in themselves appeal to stock responses), and the mechanical rhythm. Literary critic Mark Royden Winchell believed that Brooks and Warren's criticism of Kilmer's poem was chiefly to demonstrate that "it is sometimes possible to learn as much about poetry from bad poems as from good ones". Refuted claims regarding inspiration Due to the enduring popular appeal of "Trees", several local communities and organizations across the United States have staked their claim to the genesis of the poem. While the accounts of family members and of documents firmly establish Mahwah being the place where Kilmer wrote the poem, several towns throughout the country have claimed that Kilmer wrote "Trees" while staying there or that