 Several critics — including both Kilmer 's contemporaries and modern scholars — have disparaged Kilmer 's work as being too religious , simple , overly sentimental , and suggested that his style was far too traditional , even archaic . Poet Conrad Aiken , a contemporary of Kilmer , lambasted his work as being unoriginal — merely " imitative with a sentimental bias " and " trotting out of the same faint passions , the same 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 . " 
