[Bradley's evaluation of Davidman is sparse, and his fullest comment about her work is contextualized is his concluding comments about Stephen Vincent Benét, the editor who transformed the Yale Series of Younger Poets into a prestigious contest.]

Of the ten poets Benét picked, almost all became successful writers. . . . Joy Davidman wrote novels, poetry, and film scripts; she has gained a measure of attention because of her marriage to C. S. Lewis, depicted in his memoir Surprised by Joy  and subsequently in the film Shadowlands.

 . . . .

The Yale volumes Benét chose reflect his own preference for poetry that is engaged in the hurly-burly of human affairs, but they also show the stamp of their impassioned and ominous times.  The thirties were a decade swept by political movements and shadowed by the gathering clouds of war, and much of that fever and sense of crisis made its way into these books.   [Muriel] Rukeyser and Davidman both espouse the political left; [Reuel] Denny [sic] and [Jeremy] Ingalls each show an acute awareness of imminent bloodshed; and [Margaret] Walker warns that cataclysm overseas will soon be mirrored by social upheaval at home.  Benét's Yale Younger Poets are energetic and opinionated, and some of their opinion is extreme; yet for all their many fierce ideas, the group forms a whole.  They have an integrity beyond that of editorial taste, a coherence imposed by overwhelming events.  Even so abstracted an intellect as Wallace Stevens acknowledged this imposition: 'In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of imagination.'  Benét's choices have been described as popular poets, and in a sense they are, but they might be better described as poets unavoidably conscious of a violent reality.