How Did Elizabeth Barrett Browning Changed In The Cry Of The Children

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a talented writer and over the years her stories and poems has not changed. Including the poem ‘The Cry of the Children’ but yet from now and then everyone’s views on the poem has changed in different ways such as the sentimental values and the religious views. Alethea Hayter, a modern critic, said she found that the poem was way too religious for the modern audience. Angela Leighton said after she read it she would think that the modern audience would see it as “propagandist ically tear-jerking poem” (Henry). Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while being one of the more talented victorian poets, wrote a poem ‘The Cry of the Children’ that modern critics do not really agree with apposed to critics from earlier times. What in the poem is looked at so differently that we now have disagreements.

Taplin said a little something about her desire, “In the face of her desire to make her contemporaries think and act in response to the pressing problems of her day, Barrett Browning's use of passionate feeling, religion, and other aspects of sentimentality seems entirely appropriate”. What Taplin was basically saying was that Browning wrote about things that was going on in her everyday life, but the fact that people back then was just about going through the same thing that she was going through at that time

they could relate. Everyday life for people in the 1800’s was really all they had besides jobs and children. Now we have television and gadgets to keep us occupied and in touch with things going on around us. Times have changed and situations are not the same the stuff she ‘preached’ really does not make sense to modern critics or readers that it would to the audience in the 1800’s. Some of Browning’s most enduring work was in her poems, but yet this generation does not read and understand her work correctly. Sure students can comprehend it but in the end they are taking it all in the wrong way. The stuff she talks about is definitely considered “real life.” “Barrett Browning's use of passionate feeling, religion, and other aspects of sentimentality seems entirely appropriate” (Barry). For the 1800’s it was completely normal for someone to talk about all of these private things all the time, but now it is a little more weirder or too much for some people. That just depends on everyone’s preferences.
“Many verses in Poems, 1844 and the reactions of Barrett Browning's first critics to them bear out Kaplan's contentions. [Modern scholars like those quoted above,] however, have chosen to ignore, dismiss, or denigrate this aspect of Barrett Browning's poetry. In doing so, scholars do her a disservice, because her deployment of sentimental strategies and devices often resulted in some of her most intellectually complex and aesthetically powerful poetry” (Oliphant). Many parts in the poem make modern scholars feel, in a way, uncomfortable because of the way that times changed and nothing is really the same anymore. In some cases critics just may not be too familiar with Browning’s work and just do not understand fully. They way we think now opposed to how we thought in the 1800’s is completely different and less complex.
Some critics were even saying that the poet was depending on such sentimental things.

“One that values effective, gripping persuasion and relies on overt emotional, even sensational, expression and religious engagement--is applied to "The Cry of the Children" and other sentimental verses in poems” (Byrd). Lots of things that Browning valued were in her poems because those are the things that she cared about the most and her writing was mostly about things that were closest to her heart. Obviously it was a little easier for her to write about things she loved, because it is a little easier for everyone to write about things they know and

love.
Barrett Browning wrote in the 1800’s meaning, of course, everything that was regarded as sentimental and sweet was much more then normal It was just normal human emotion that everyone knew, and were completely aware of. Now people think of those emotions of being private or something someone only shows to the people very close to them. Shackford says it was her traditional style to write like that. "literary sentimentalism ... is premised on an emotional and philosophical ethos that celebrates human connection, both personal and communal," (Shackford). The poem has not changed in any way but times have. The way critics review the poem is all dependent on their view on life and emotions. This all does not rely on the writer but the critic in the most heaviest way. Times are so different to the point to where a poem can not even be read the way it is supposed to because someone might take it the wrong way. Minds have changed and society as a whole has yet to realize that not in a good way we have change but in a difficult way. Browning’s poem was beautiful and some critics have a problem with the sentimentalism that the poem holds.