While little or no criticism appears available on "Beware of Ruins," at least in the United States, what Ruth Morse writes about Hope's poetry in her introduction to A. D. Hope: Selected Poems (1986) applies: "The general effect [is] a kind of elevated conversational tone: the lines give the impression of a speaking voice, but are often more formal or complex than an actual speaker would be. While his syntax exploits normal English order, his adherence to formal metres gives him the added resources of a traditional rhythm and rhyme."

Writing in his work A. D. Hope, Kevin Hart argues that Hope is a visionary who longs "for an organic wholeness" and a "heightened sense of the primacy and irreducibility of poetry." But Hope's poetry is not visionary in the tradition of the French poet, Rimbaud who sought a disordering of all the senses during the Symbolist...