Jean Ingelow - Criticism

Criticism

Her poems, collected in one volume in 1898, were frequently popular successes. Sailing beyond Seas and When Sparrows build in Supper at the Mill were among the most popular songs of the day. Her best-known poems include High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire and "Divided".

There have many parodies of her poetry, particularly of her archaisms, flowery language, and perceived sentimentality. These include Lovers, and a Reflexion') by Charles Stuart Calverley and "Supper at the Kind Brown Mill," a parody of her "Supper at the Mill", within Sorrentino's satirical novel "Blue Pastoral" (1983).

Others, particularly her contemporaries, have defended her work. Gerald Massey described "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire" as ". . . . a poem full of power and tenderness."

Still, the larger literary world largely dismissed her work. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, for example, wrote this of her: "if we had nothing of Jean Ingelow’s but the most remarkable poem entitled Divided, it would be permissible to suppose the loss, in fact or in might-have-been, of a poetess of almost the highest rank... Jean Ingelow wrote some other good things, but nothing at all equalling this; while she also wrote too much and too long." Some of this criticism has had overtones of dismissiveness of her as a female writer, where Cambridge continued, for example, to say, " Unless a man is an extraordinary coxcomb, a person of private means, or both, he seldom has the time and opportunity of committing, or the wish to commit, bad or indifferent verse for a long series of years; but it is otherwise with woman."