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". The review says that some of Abbey's language "jars on the ear" and calls the verse "awkward" (p. 465). 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).