From a young age Cecil Frances Alexander was drawn to writing poetry, frequently preparing a weekly newsletter of comic and serious verse for her family. As an adult she followed the Victorian tradition of writing poems on medieval subjects, but the works that brought her the most recognition were her devotional poems and her hymns, which were inspired by the Oxford Movement. Noted Victorian authority G. B. Tennyson, who defines devotional poetry as verse that is tied to acts of worship, notes that the verse growing out of the Oxford movement, especially its Tractarian phase, is characteristically devotional.

While other Victorian women poets such as Christina Rossetti wrote poetry, religious and otherwise, expressly for publication, no other woman poet was as consistently didactic in her public verse as Alexander. Considered by many as one of the finest English women hymn writers, she desired to make doctrinal subjects such...