James Schuyler is regularly grouped with John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch, all poets of the New York School. His poetry, like that of his confreres, celebrates the universe of objects, or the "joy in random surfaces," as David Kalstone noted in the New York Times Book Review. Three books of poetry, Freely Espousing, The Crystal Lithium, and Hymn to Life, reveal a poet who "speaks softly and carries no shtick at all," commented Edmund White of the Village Voice. "The moments of relaxed awareness, of a serenity achieved in spite of suffering, moments that many other poets would ignore or fail to see as poetic occasions—these moments Schuyler preserves and explores." A novelist as well as a poet, Schuyler's A Nest of Ninnies and What's for Dinner? are similar in purpose, presenting what Eve Ottenberg called "an easy and humorous middle-class world betwixt shopping center and commuter train." Freely Espousing, Schuyler's first major collection of poems, introduced critics to the work of a mature poet who had been writing for almost twenty years. John Koethe remarked in his review that "not only is Freely Espousing a collection of extremely good poems, but it also embodies the sort of vision that periodically reawakens us to the infinite range of possibilities open to the poet." The "bewildering, breathing" accumulation of objects and perceptions in his poems recalls the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, he observed, although Schuyler's poems are delivered with a personal, "disarmingly open" voice that distinguishes them from the impersonal tone of Moore's poetry. Another critic, Guy Davenport of the New York Times Book Review, suggested that Schuyler's is a lyric poetry, one that "channels the world through a single sensibility" and makes it part of "a new Romanticism... and a new subjectivity."

David Shapiro's reading of The Crystal Lithium, a collection of poems published in 1972, held that Schuyler "always observes vibrantly before any interpretation, and renders all as vividly as possible." The poems address the minutiae of daily life, such as the smell of coffee on a winter morning, and again reveal "a meticulous, Williams-like devotion to the physical world," according to the Virginia Quarterly Review. As Stephen Spender observed, "It is as though the poem were a sensitized plate held up to a real landscape, transforming the objects actually there into poetry and creating form which is dictated by the rhythms of the sights and sounds actually present." David Kalstone contended that these are "the best poems [Schuyler] has ever written," and Shapiro concluded that the poet's "uneasy rapports with the personal, his delicate epistles, his reportage, his catalogue raisonne of the perishable, constitute paradoxically a transcendental poetry without the divine term."

In his Village Voice review of Hymn to Life (1974), Edmund White reflected on the sense of immanence found in Schuyler's work: "Schuyler senses that time and nature are always about to surrender their meanings, if we could only decode them, the 'untranslatable glyphs' of raindrops caught on a window screen or the gray April light that 'spells out bare spots' on the lawn. We are surrounded by the stuff of meaning but we don't know how to fashion it into explanations. What we are left with are dark and bright scraps, with sumptuous, ordinary moments."

In 1969 Schuyler co-wrote A Nest of Ninnies with his friend John Ashbery. There was a mixed critical response to the novel, depending on the features critics chose to emphasize. Some dismissed its plotless banality as just another attack on the vacuity of middle-class life in America. Others thought its pointlessness was the point worth stressing, finding its unseriousness an especially effective way to highlight the book's genuine concern: language. As Mary Ellmann noted in the Yale Review, "The real subject is expression, varieties of expression in English."

Part of the book's charm for some readers is the way two families from Kelton, NY, the Bushes and the Bridgewaters, live in such uneventful weightlessness that it defeats the whole idea of a plot. Nothing of any earth-shaking import happens to these people, submerged as they are in the most ordinary activities of suburbia; the commonplace overwhelms their lives. As John Koethe observed, it almost eliminates the purpose, even the possibility of characterization: "Careers of eating, drinking, conversing and marrying are pursued by the characters, who have a way of merging into each other so much that after the grand finale it is a little difficult to remember exactly what was done, and by whom, and who has married whom."

Sara Blackburn of Nation found it a "maddening...boring" book; Audrey C. Foote of Book World complained about its plotlessness, its mockery of suburbanites, and its lunch-counter dialogue. But other reviewers called it "immensely hilarious...an extremely funny novel"; "a delight to read"; "a weightless, pointless, and delightful book." Ellmann contended that the playfulness of words and expressions accounts for the book's humor and value; it is crammed full of formal discourse, archaic phrases, colloquialisms, mock-heroic diction, jargon, gratuitous French, and English idioms. She observed that "what the writers share with the readers is a fondness for every fixed form or phrase in English. It is not mockery, but a delight in the basic inanity of these forms....[There is] much bidding good night and bending steps and there we must leave them for a while....The pointless point seems to be: words are multitudinous, ridiculous, and entirely enjoyable."

In his Poetry review, Koethe warned against reading the book "as another heavy-handed expose of the emptiness of the middle class.... Not only are the people here treated with the fond acceptance that characterizes Schuyler's attitude towards things in Freely Espousing, but also the depiction is so realistic that it tends to deflate the myth that there is some more fulfilling way of life lurking somewhere nearby. For the disarming thing about the ninnies is that despite their apparent vacuity they live pretty much like most of us do....[Their lives] suggest that the situation in which we and the other ninnies find ourselves may be either more earth-shakingly banal than we know, or an unrecognized heaven."

Schuyler's 1978 novel, What's for Dinner?, returns to the suburban ambience of A Nest of Ninnies. Eve Ottenberg, in the Village Voice, noted that the pervasive sense of well-being of the earlier book is not as long-lived this time around—nearly a third of the story is set in a hospital alcoholic ward—but that the new novel is still a "tight, comic" estimation of middle-class life. Once again nothing much happens in the novel, the characters are devoid of history, and life consists largely of ordinary, anonymous occasions. As Dean Flower of the Hudson Review observed, "Schuyler constructs his novel out of all the little rituals of polite society: having friends for dinner, playing bridge, drinking, making conversation,... managing an affair, minding other people's business."

The story concerns an alcoholic housewife, Lottie Taylor, her philandering husband Norris, and their lumbering, conventional neighbors. In short, Lottie undergoes detoxification, Norris has an affair in her absence, and the neighbors constantly gossip. In the end Lottie is returned to health, Norris returns to Lottie, and the neighbors constantly gossip. Almost all of the story is presented as dialogue; there is very little narration. "The characters are mere voices, but ingeniously consistent voices—they have the consistency found in life," Ottenberg remarked. "It is the surface of life that Schuyler is after; the deliberate, yammering silliness of these characters persists through the tragedies of their lives, and in the end it makes them more than ninnies and even helps them endure."

In his review of the novel, Stephen Spender found an underlying pattern to these lives that illustrates something about social neurosis in America: "Perhaps there is irony in the happy ending with which [Schuyler] provides Lottie and Norris Taylor.... The deeper irony lies perhaps in the implication that the circle which is the home feeds its unfortunates into the circle which is the hospital, and the hospital feeds the 'cured' back into the home." Each character is enclosed somehow in "this claustrophobic world of material satisfactions," he suggested, and none really has any idea how to break out of it without risking hospitalization or something worse. Flower concluded: "The novel offers no cures, only a skeptical picture of the enclosed self. Although Schuyler celebrates the disruptive impulses,... the therapeutic moments of desire or anger, he shows that in the end these amount to little more than shaking the bars of a comfortable cage."

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