[1][2][4][5] It is notable for its poetic representations of personal emotion, which made it an important early text in the Romantic literary movement.

[4]: 11  This pursuit of simple, direct expression is among the reasons Smith is classed as a Romantic poet, and anticipates the poetic innovations of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads.

[3] The Romantic poet John Keats was indebted to Smith's innovations for his own attempts to devise a new, specifically English sonnet form.

[3]: 218  Other major writers who shaped Smith's poetry include Francesco Petrarch, James Thomson, and Alexander Pope.

[1] The sonnet as a poetic form was first popular in English language during the Renaissance, but it had fallen out of use by the eighteenth century.

[4]: 10  Paula Feldman and Daniel Robinson described the revival as "the first period of literary history in which women poets showed they could match skill with male poets in an arena earlier closed to them, for previously women had existed in the sonnet only as love objects to be wooed or idealized.

"[4]: 10  The sonnet form, as a classic and almost old-fashioned kind of writing, carried a cultural legitimacy which was lacking in newer genres like the novel.

[2]: 40  She was the subject of extended praise by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, and Leigh Hunt, among many others.

By the mid nineteenth century, she was no longer considered a major poet in her own right, but simply a "woman writer" and therefore "minor".

[2]: 20 With the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1980s, scholars rediscovered Smith's works, especially Elegiac Sonnets.