Gerald Stern, in his foreword to Rose, describes Li-Young Lee's poetry as having "the large vision, the deep seriousness and the almost heroic ideal, reminiscent more of John Keats, Rainer Maria Rilke and perhaps Theodore Roethke than William Carlos Williams on the one hand or T. S. Eliot on the other." Lee lists among his influences such writers as John Keats, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Bruno Schulz, Emily Brontë, Cynthia Ozick, Li Bai, Tu Fu, Su Tung Po, and Yang Wan Li.

Critical reaction to Lee's collections has been favorable. One reviewer wrote in the Bloomsbury Review that Rose "was created by a young voice whose fire is only beginning to burn." Another reviewer for the Pennsylvania Review observed, "Here is a poet unafraid of exceeding tenderness, and agile enough to walk the tightrope between anger and fear." Of Lee's second book, The City in...