"[4] Los Angeles Times reviewer Victoria Chang says that Seuss is "writing some of the most animated and complex poetry today,"[5] and goes on to writeIn an age where poetry can so easily be simplified into small one-dimensional sound bites to share on Instagram or Twitter, Seuss's poems aspire to complicate, drawing connections between seemingly unrelated things, flowing in and out and back and away from their initial triggers.
"[6] Seuss's third collection, Four Legged Girl, is "concerned with loss," including the deaths of her father and of a former lover, but also addresses "importance of living in the present," writes Marybeth Rua-Larsen.
[7] She goes on "In Four-Legged Girl, Seuss not only turns the common associations of flowers as gentle and delicate things easily damaged into symbols of strength and aggression but does so with energy, inventiveness, and a wildness that is incapable of being tamed."
In the American Poetry Review, Margaree Little addresses the collection's title, which refers to Myrtle Corbin, a Victorian-era person who was born with four legs, and who appears on the cover of the book.
[11] Reviewer Laurie Stone writes that the poems' use of painting allows them to "freeze time" and makes them a "lab for experiments with language, rough emotions, and the indeterminacy of feeling.
Critic Laurie Stone sees Seuss's use of poetic form as a metaphor: "A sonnet is like a trapped body: all physical limits and nowhere to run but inside the lyrical imagination.
Scott sees in the poem an "unromantic, prosaic, crude" physical description of a "stinky, runty, manifestly unlovable poet" paired with praise for his "immaculate art."
He concludes "Keats himself, made real in Seuss’s poem — a living, embodied presence she cannot help loving, in spite of whatever unpleasantness her scholar friend might reveal about him.