Together with Ion Creangă and Petre Ispirescu, Pann was among the first major interpreters of Romanian folklore in 19th-century literature. Appealing primarily to a semi-educated audience, his creations have been celebrated for their familiar tone and use of plain Romanian, during a period when literary language was beginning to rely on formalism and a large number of neologisms. The writer himself made frequent excuses to the more educated of his readers for any flaws they were to find in his texts, specifying that he lacked in formal training. In the final decades of his life, several of his printed works, especially "Memorialul focului mare" and the "manele" lyrics collection "Spitalul amorului", came to be appreciated by a younger generation of boyars. The Moldavian poet Vasile Alecsandri noted, in an 1872 letter quoted by Garabet Ibrăileanu: "Anton Pann has not yet been appreciated to his full value, and moreover, in Wallachia his merits are even being held in contempt by most modern men of letters".