Literary critics H.B. Jassin and Zuber Usman view the collection as an attempt to address Amir’s worldly problems. The collection has been noted as difficult to read owing to its usage of rarely used Malay and Javanese terms and basis in Islamic culture and Malay history. Despite this, Nyanyi Sunyi has been described as freer in its form than traditional Malay poetry, with what poet Chairil Anwar termed "compactly violent, sharp, and yet short"[1] sentences which brought a new style to the Indonesian language.