 199-201)

"The Two Voices" attracted the attention of scholar Herbert Spencer, who believed some of the theories between the poem and his own book, "The Principles of Psychology", were interconnected.Jerome Buckley asserted that the poem is "tinged with Satanic irony", and "the voice of negation, cynical and realistic, puncturing a desperate idealism, forced upon the reluctant ego an awareness of man’s fundamental insignificance" and that it "remains intense as the colloquy of denial with doubt in the dark night of the soul".Basil Willey claimed