Page "Adelaide Anne Procter" Paragraph 27

Modern critics have given Procter's work little attention.

The few critics who have examined Procter's poetry generally find it important for the way that Procter overtly expresses conventional sentiments while covertly undermining them.

According to Isobel Armstrong, Procter's poetry, like that of many 19th-century women poets, employs conventional ideas and modes of expression without necessarily espousing them in entirety.

Francis O ' Gorman cites " A Legend of Provence " as an example of a poem with this kind of " double relationship with the structures of gender politics it seems to affirm.

" Other critics since Armstrong agree that Procter's poetry, while ladylike on the surface, shows signs of repressed emotions and desires.

Kirstie Blair states that the suppression of emotion in Procter's work makes the narrative poems all the more powerful, and Gill Gregory argues that Procter's poetry often explores female sexuality in an unconventional way, while as often voicing anxiety about sexual desires.

However, Elizabeth Gray criticizes the fact that the few discussions of Procter's poetry that do exist focus primarily on gender, arguing that the " range and formal inventiveness of this illuminatingly representative Victorian poet have remained largely unexplored.