 Flanagan himself considered his songwriting style to be "'not just prosodized [sic] declamation, but...a bona fide lyric utterance'".Flanagan "was passionately concerned with language and felt that American composers would never fully realize themselves until they came to grips with native inflection.Ned Rorem, in his New Grove's article on Flanagan, says that Flanagan was "directly responsible for the oral style in the early plays of his close friend Edward Albee".