William Burford's poems are marked by deep vision, austere and passionate feeling, exactitude of diction, and gravity of presence.
He writes of his own work: "Poetry, at least as I have learned to want to write it, is a way of giving reality and even courage to the life which a man senses within himself and which he knows, by living among other men, is their chief possession also. The poetry which seems to me the most admirable is characterized by a certain firm delicacy, a style which at once both moves and instructs the sense of life in us. If a man writes poems of his own for any length of time, he learns how much experience of both life and art is required to achieve this style, how few men have been masters of it, and these few seemingly by some grace of nature or intelligence or artistic perception, that cannot be willed by himself into his own possession but only perhaps gradually approached if he has a view of the goal."