Frances Cornford published nine books of poetry and three translations between 1910 and 1960. Her poems usually address the subjects of female lives lived by forced necessity apart from the busy, noisy main stream. Her early verse was widely popular and drew very positive critical attention, but her popularity waned in later years. Some critics accused her of simplification and naiveté, but this suggests an oversimplification in the critic rather than the poet. Her poems convey their meaning in sharp, slightly surreal, and often memorable images, and her treatment of tradition, and later of war and death, needs to be seen in part as ironizing her poems' cheery rhymes.