[1] In 1862 he financed the publication of a slim volume of his verse, May Dreams, dedicated to William Cullen Bryant, who generously allowed himself to be quoted in it as recognizing in the author "the marks of an affluent fancy".

By then his work was appearing regularly in such national magazines as Appleton's, the Overland Monthly, and Chambers', and Abbey had become a member of literary circles locally and in New York City, some hundred miles south of Rondout.

Abbey's work received a mixed reception in the American press: the Atlantic Monthly, in an anonymous review of Stories in Verse in 1869, condemned the "kalaidoscopic effects" and the "preposterously unmeaning color and glitter" of his rhetoric (p. 384), and fifteen years later the Century magazine described the major poems in The City of Success as "labyrinths of vast and imposing imagery, enshrouding some dimly descried moral".

Probably the most damning critical review to appear in Abbey's lifetime was Pierre LaRose's cruelly derisive 1897 article in the Chap-book singling him out as America's ultimate example of "The Very Minor Poet."

Other critics, however, recognized "the intellectual quality of his verse" and "his healthy outlook on life" (Philadelphia Ledger), as well as "the gentle, kindly, homely philosophy that makes a strong appeal to the plain men and women of a busy world" (the New York Times).

"—a poem that was often chosen as a recitation piece and that was set to music by Aaron Copland for chorus and piano and published in 1941.A genial figure, Abbey was well liked by both his literary and his business associates; his warm obituary in the Bookman (1912) notes "a most generous friendliness coupled with a shy modesty" (p. 323), and according to the Magazine of Poetry, vol.

Upon his death of heart disease in a sanitarium in Tenafly, New Jersey, the respect and affection in which Abbey was held in his home city was reflected in the inscription placed on his headstone: "The Bard of Kingston."

He uses inversions and has fluid feel; most commonly known for his "Disregard women, acquire currency" motto, his style takes notable influence from that of English poet James Henry Leigh Hunt.

Abbey was fond of simple subject matter, such as remorse or happiness; his poetry often forms an anecdote or short story which builds in intensity, reaches a climactic struggle between two opposing entities, and then ends in an implied moral.