At the time of publication reviews were mixed,[4] but more recently critics (now less bothered by what was earlier done away with as mere sentimentality) have begun to appreciate the collection again, for its political message and for its rhetorical strategies.

[2] In January 1843, Longfellow corresponded with Rufus Wilmot Griswold about reviewing his Poems on Slavery in Graham's Magazine.

In a letter to Henry Russell Cleveland in November 1842, Longfellow told of how he had written the poems on his way home and "shall not dare to send them to you in Cuba, for fear of having you seized as an Abolitionist".

[8] Longfellow wrote to George Lunt that he was "sorry you find so much to gainsay in my Poems on Slavery"[8] and spoke about his beliefs by using an article by William Ware from the Christian Examiner.

She called it "the thinnest of all Mr. Longfellow's thin books; spirited and polished, like its forerunners; but the topic would warrant a deeper tone".

Longfellow spoke of how the poems had favorable reception from people, and how he thought that they were "so mild that even a slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast".

Janet Harris, in 1978, remarked on the courage it must have taken for a man like Longfellow, who took such great interest in the public perception, to publish these controversial poems in 1842, even at the risk of it hurting sales for his other writings.

[4] Harriet Beecher Stowe reprinted "The Quadroon Girl" in Chapter IV of A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

[13] Paul K. Johnston, Professor of English at State University of New York at Plattsburgh, notes that Poems on Slavery, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, is "rehabilitated as a political statement on behalf of its marginalized characters", and has survived a half-century of formalist literacy in the 20th century that considered his and Stowe's work merely sentimental and didactic.