although rossetti's popularity in her lifetime did not approach that of the contemporaneous elizabeth barrett browning, her standing remained strong after her death. her popularity faded in the early 20th century in the wake of modernism, although scholars began to explore freudian themes in her work, such as religious and sexual repression, reaching for personal, biographical interpretations of her poetry. in the 1970s academics began to study her work again, looking beyond the lyrical romantic sweetness to her mastery of prosody and versification. feminists held her as symbol of constrained female genius, placed as a leader of 19th-century poets. her writings strongly influenced the work of such writers as ford madox ford, virginia woolf, gerard manley hopkins, elizabeth jennings, and philip larkin. critic basil de selincourt stated that she was "all but our greatest woman poet... incomparably our greatest craftswoman... probably in the first twelve of the masters of english verse."