Procter's poetry was strongly influenced by her religious beliefs and charity work; homelessness, poverty, and
fallen women are frequent themes. Procter's preface to
A Chaplet of Verses and many of her poems stress the misery of the conditions under which the poor lived. Procter's Catholicism also influenced her choice of images and symbols; Procter often uses references to the Virgin Mary, for example, to "introduce secular and Protestant readers to the possibility that a heavenly order critiques Victorian gender ideology's power structure."), although she rarely deals directly with the topic, preferring to leave war "in the background, something to be inferred rather than stated." Generally, these poems portray conflict as something "that might unite a nation that had been divided by class distinctions." unlike many other women poets of the time, such as
Felicia Hemans and
Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Nor is Procter particularly interested in questions of gender roles. Procter is instead primarily concerned with the working classes, particularly working-class women, and with "emotions of women antagonists which have not fully found expression". Procter's work often embodies a Victorian aesthetic of sentimentality, but, according to Francis O'Gorman, does so with "peculiar strength"; Procter employs emotional affect without simplification, holding "emotional energy [in tension] ... against complications and nuances." and her poetry is marked by "simplicity, directness, and clarity of expression". While critics have long dismissed Procter because her poetry is "straightforward" and religious (and thus deemed full of "sentimental excesses"), her work shows technical skill in its playing with ambiguities of stress and "temporal dislocation." Critics have also for the most part ignored most of Procter's poems, "preferring to discuss the few poems of social critique ... over, for example, the many paeans to Mary." Karen Dieleman, however, argues that taking into account both Procter's religious beliefs and contemporary Roman Catholic liturgical practices shows that Procter's poetry is "attuned to the power of both affect and reserve, spontaneity and control, lay devotion and moral authority."
Reputation Procter was "fabulously popular" in the mid-19th century; she was
Queen Victoria's favourite poet Readers valued Procter's poems for their plainness of expression, although they were considered "not so very original in thought; [their merit is that] they are indeed the utterances 'of a believing heart', pouring out its fulness." Procter herself expressed little ambition about her work: her friend Bessie Raynor Belloc thought that Procter was pained that her reputation as a poet had outstripped her father's, and quoted Procter as saying that "Papa is a poet. I only write verses." Procter's popularity continued after her death; the first volume of
Legends and Lyrics went through 19 editions by 1881, and the second through 14 editions by the same year. or otherwise set to music. Among these was "
The Lost Chord", which
Arthur Sullivan set to music in 1877; this song was the most commercially successful of the 1870s and 1880s in both Britain and the United States. Composer
Hermine Küchenmeister-Rudersdorf set Procter's text to music in her song "Shadow". Her work was also published in the United States and translated into German. Critics such as Cheri Larsen Hoeckley, Kathleen Hickok, and Natalie Joy Woodall argue that the demise of Procter's reputation is due at least in part to the way Charles Dickens characterized her as a "model middle-class domestic angel" and a "fragile and modest saint" rather than as an "active feminist and strong poet." 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 she 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. 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." ==List of works==