Nearly a year before the 1862 issuance of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and other Poems, no less a respected critic than John Ruskin pronounced her work unpublishable. Her poems, he wrote, "are full of beauty and power but so full are they of quaintnesses and offences" that "no publisher... would take them." The unusual rhyme schemes and metrical irregularity of pieces like "Goblin Market" and "The Convent Threshold" were particularly disturbing to Ruskin, and he advised that, before she attempt to place her verses before an audience, Rossetti "exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she can write as the public like. Then, if she puts in her observation and passion all will become precious. But she must have the Form first" (Cook and Wedderbum, XXXVI, 354-5).

The critical acclaim with which Goblin Market and other Poems was met, however, fimmly established the formal innovations of the Pre-Raphaelite school in the public taste. An Athenaeum critic, in a review of 26 April 1862, praised the manner in which the volume demonstrated "in essence and fomm the individuality of the writer" and compared reading her poems to "passing from a picture gallery, with its well-feigned semblance of nature, to the real nature out-of-doors. " Swinbume, himself a keen technical experimenter, later spoke of Christina Rossetti's role in the Pre-Raphaelite movement as "the Jael who led their host to victory" (Smulders 1996, 22).