including "The Raggedy Man" and "Little Orphant Annie". Many of his poems used events and people from his childhood as an inspiration for subject their matter. His poems often contain morals and warnings for children, with messages telling children to care for the less fortunate of society. David Galens and Van Allen both see these messages as Riley's subtle response to the turbulent economic times of the Gilded Age and the growing progressive movement. Riley believed that urbanization robbed children of their innocence and sincerity, and in his poems he attempted to introduce and idolize characters who had not lost those qualities. His children's poems are "exuberant, performative, and often display Riley's penchant for using humorous characterization, repetition, and dialect to make his poetry accessible to a wide-ranging audience". Although hinted at indirectly in some poems, Riley wrote very little on serious subjects, and mocked attempts at serious poetry. Only a few of his sentimental poems concern serious subjects. "Little Mandy's Christmas-Tree", "The Absence of Little Wesley", and "The Happy Little Cripple" are about poverty, the death of a child, and disabilities. Like his children's poems, they also contain morals, suggesting society should pity the downtrodden and be charitable. Riley wrote gentle and romantic poems that were not in dialect. They generally consist of sonnets and are strongly influenced by the works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His standard English poetry was never as popular as his Hoosier dialect poems. Still less popular were the poems Riley wrote in his later years; most were to commemorate important events in American history or to eulogize the dead. Riley's contemporaries acclaimed him "America's best-loved poet". In 1920, Henry Beers lauded the works of Riley "as natural and unaffected, with none of the discontent and deep thought of cultured song". Samuel Clemens, William Dean Howells, and Hamlin Garland, each praised Riley's work and the idealism he expressed in his poetry. Only a few critics of the period found fault with Riley's works. Ambrose Bierce criticized Riley for his frequent use of dialect. He accused Riley of using dialect to "cover up [the] faulty construction" of his poems. Edgar Lee Masters found Riley's work to be superficial, claiming it lacked irony and that he had only a "narrow emotional range". By the 1930s popular critical opinion towards Riley's works began to shift in favor of the negative reviews.