Popa's poetry [in his Collected Poems] is highly formalized. But it is not formalization in the senses of imagism or surrealism, though Popa … was finding his style at a time when more or less precise and intelligent versions of surrealism were a common fashion in European poetry.

Cycles of poems link up in Popa's work to form both a human and a legendary landscape, the one included in the other…. [History] and myth seep naturally into the poet's apprehension of the present, without any feeling that he is making use of nationalism and folklore….

The more personal poems are as effective in their domesticity, their saturation in friends and family affairs, as any of the other "life studies" we are now accustomed to in contemporary poetry. (p. 29)

A sense of the young instrument and the old tradition makes affinities between Popa and such Rumanian poets as [Lucian] Blaga...