In the following essay, Friedman discusses Stone's style and themes as they appear throughout the body of her work.

Although at age forty-four she was no beginner when she published her first book, In an Iridescent Time, in 1959, Ruth Stone was working largely within the elegant, formal conventions of that era, showing her respect for the likes of Ransom and Stevens. Thus, along with many other women poets of the 1950s—Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich—she began her career by expressing a female vision through a male medium.

Nevertheless, within the largely regular forms of these early poems there is heard a complex woman's voice compounded of the artful naivete of fable and tale and the deceptive simplicity of a sophisticated artist. The voice is as responsive to marriage, family, and human solitude as it is to animals, landscapes, and seasons. Given to gorgeous diction, eloquent...