Negative perspectives on the poem continued into the 21st century. In 2000, Helen Vendler wrote that because Whitman "was bent on registering individual response as well as the collective wish expressed in 'Hush'd be the camps', he took on the voice of a single representative sailor silencing his own idiosyncratic voice". Elsewhere, she states that two "stylistic features—its meter and its use of refrain—mark 'O Captain' as a designedly democratic and populist poem". Four years later, Epstein wrote that he struggled to believe that the same writer wrote both "Lilacs" and "O Captain! My Captain!". Poet Robert Pinsky told the New York Times News Service in 2009 that he considered the poem "not very good", and a year later another poet, C. K. Williams, concluded that the poem was a "truly awful piece of near doggerel triteness" that deserved derisive criticism. Meanwhile, the 2004 Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature entry on Whitman suggests that critiques about the poem's rhythm are unfair.