In an article for the New York Times Book Review on Scripts for the Pageant, Denis Donoghue determines that Merrill's “common style is a net of loose talk tightening to verse, a mode in which nearly anything can be said with grace.” He finds a strong connection between W. H. Auden and Merrill, an association other scholars have noted as well, especially in his Divine Comedies.

Louis Simpson writes in his review of that collection, also in the New York Times Book Review: “Auden would have liked all this very much—he had small patience with simplicity, whether natural or assumed.” Simpson likens the poems in Divine Comedies to “a kaleidoscope—a brightly colored pattern or scene twitching into another pattern.” Deeming Merrill's writing “ingenious” and “witty,” Simpson finds that “a society of cultivated readers might give [the poems] a high place” but acknowledges that Merrill...