Describing her most recent poetry collection, Kevin Prufer writes, "I cannot imagine the serious reader — poet or not — who could leave Captive Voices unmoved by the work of this supremely gifted poet who skips so nimbly around our sadnesses and fears, never directly addressing them, suggesting, instead, their complex resistance to summary.

Despite precocious beginnings, therefore, Eleanor Ross largely ceased to write when she married the major short story writer and novelist, Peter Taylor.

She served as wife, mother, housekeeper, hostess, letter-writer, and also family packer, as Peter Taylor nomadically moved from one to another writer-in-residence post.

[9] In her New York Times review, the poet Adrienne Rich commented that, "What I find compelling in the poems of Eleanor Taylor, besides the authority and originality of her language, is the underlying sense of how the conflicts of imaginative and intelligent women have driven them on, lashed them into genius or madness, ...".

[10] Taylor's third collection, New and Selected Poems (1983), was published by a small press run by Stuart T. Wright,[11] and apparently received very little distribution.

In his review of this volume, Richard Howard summarized Taylor's poetry, Eleanor Ross Taylor devised, in her startling first poems over thirty years ago, and practices still, for all the modesty of her address, a tough modernist poetics of fragmentation and erasure, the verse rarely indulging in recurrent pattern or recognizable figure, the lines usually short and sharp in their resonance, gists and surds of a discourse allusive to the songs and sayings of a largely southern community dispersed among Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida and readiest (or at least, most eloquent) to speak in the tongues of remembered or imagined Others.

"[14] In a 2002 interview with Taylor, Susan Settlemyre Williams proposed Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop as possible influences, but Taylor herself acknowledged Edna St. Vincent Millay as the poet she had read enthusiastically as a student, and who had "made me feel that poetry was contemporary and could relate to me right now, in the way that you know that all those wonderful heroines of poetry and heroes do, ...".

"[16] Gudas discerns a tension that "has everything to do with the history of white women in the male-dominated, white supremacist South; and it is embodied in the music and rhythms of the poems, wherein a restrained, almost genteel tone is shot through with "a passion always threatening to go undisciplined with the characteristic intensity of her native South" (in the aptly worded jacket copy of her last book)."

Half dizzy I come down to my yard yews my late husband planted East and color raying far no line between earth's atmosphere black space no oxygen Jean Valentine edited a collection of essays about Taylor's poetry that was published in 2001.

She received the 2000 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, which honors a "substantial and distinguished career".