Coventry Patmore

• Born: July 23, 1823
• Birthplace: Woodford, Essex, England
• Died: November 26, 1896
• Place of death: Lymington, Hampshire, England

Other literary forms

The prose works of Coventry Patmore (PAHT-mohr) include essays, a biography, numerous letters, and aphoristic collections. His Essay on English Metrical Law was published in 1856 (a critical edition was published in 1961). More than twenty years later, he published his first book of prose, a biography of the poet Barry Cornwall titled Bryan Waller Procter (1877). He published an account of his success in managing his estate at Heron’s Ghyll in How I Managed and Improved My Estate (1888). His major collections of prose are: Principle in Art (1889); Religio Poetœ (1893); and Rod, Root, and Flower (1895).

A five-volume edition of his Works was published in London in 1907. No edition of his letters exists, but many can be found in Basil Champneys’s Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore (1900) and in Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1956, Claude C. Abbott, editor), the latter volume containing Patmore’s correspondence with Hopkins.

Achievements

Coventry Patmore has often been referred to as a man and a poet of contradictions, and his achievements—as both—are equally contradictory. He was one of the most popular of all Victorian poets. The Angel in the House had gone into a sixth edition by 1885, and by the time of his death in 1896, it had sold more than 250,000 copies. He was widely read throughout the British Empire as well as in the United States and other countries. He was also, however, one the most quickly forgotten of Victorian poets. His reputation went into eclipse in the late 1860’s and early 1870’s, enjoyed a brief revival in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s, and then fell into a critical and popular decline that has never been reversed.

Biography

Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore’s life falls roughly into four periods, the latter three of which correspond to his three marriages. The first period, up to his first marriage, was dominated by his father, Peter George Patmore. Peter Patmore was a man devoted to the arts, intent on social climbing, and steadfast in his devotion to friends. His life, unfortunately, was beset with problems and scandals. Peter was the man to whom William Hazlitt wrote some of the letters later published in Liber Amoris (1823), letters in which the married Hazlitt confessed to a degrading love affair with a young girl. When the book was published, both author and recipients were critically condemned for, at least, a serious breach of taste. Two years earlier, in 1821, Peter had been a second in a duel during which his principal was killed, there being reason to believe that Peter’s ignorance of the rules of dueling led to the death. In any event, he was condemned for his role in the affair and actually left the country to avoid prosecution. On his return, Peter married Eliza Robertson, a young Scotswoman of strict religious beliefs and practices.

Peter later speculated in railway shares, lost a great deal of money, and fled to the Continent, leaving the twenty-two-year-old Coventry and his siblings without support. Finally, in 1854, Peter published My Friends and Acquaintances, a book of memoirs that was poorly received and that managed to rekindle the flame of controversy surrounding the duel of years earlier. Peter died the following year.

Despite his tumultuous life, Peter was a father who encouraged Coventry’s poetic gifts early in life, insisting that his son publish his first volume of poems when he was only twenty-one. Peter had always encouraged Coventry’s love of literature, and the two often read and discussed various authors. Perhaps in response to his wife’s stern religious beliefs, Peter offered his children no religious training, preferring to treat the Bible as merely a work in the body of literature for which he had much respect. Peter was concerned enough with Coventry’s education, however, to send him to Paris in 1839 to improve his French. There Coventry fell in love with the daughter of Mrs. Gore, an English novelist who had a salon in the Place Vendôme. His love, however, was not reciprocated, and the bitterness of the affair became entangled with his bitterly anti-French sentiments, feelings that lasted most of his lifetime. While in Paris, Coventry began to explore the question of religious belief, seeking principles by which he could live and to which he could devote his work.

In 1842, Coventry visited Edinburgh and the home of his mother’s family. There the religious questioning that had begun in Paris was intensified by a personal experience that brought him in contact with the Free Kirk piety and severity that surrounded him. This discomfiting episode became entangled with his anti-Scottish sentiment, also a feeling that lasted all his life.

For some time afterward, Patmore dabbled in reading, painting, and chemistry, conducting experiments in his own laboratory. He earned a meager living by translating and writing for the periodical reviews. In 1844, at the insistence of his father, he published his first volume, Poems. In 1846, he was given a post at the Library of the British Museum. Two years later, he became engaged to Emily Augusta Andrews, the daughter of a Congregational minister. They were married in Hampstead in 1847.

The Patmores settled in Highgate, where they entertained such visitors as Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin, not to mention Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They were very popular with their visitors and seemed to enjoy their “court” in this suburb of London.

Patmore continued his work at the British Museum, and Emily bore six children over the course of their marriage. From all that can be learned, this was indeed a happy marriage, one in which Emily felt the joys of love, home, and motherhood as much as Patmore reveled in being the “breadwinner,” patron, and husband to such a family. One record of the marriage is, of course, The Angel in the House; the first two parts, The Betrothal and The Espousals, dealing with courtship and marriage, were published in 1854 and 1856. The second installment in this poem, titled The Victories of Love, was also published in two parts: Faithful for Ever in 1860 and The Victories of Love in 1862. This work anticipates and reflects the event that shattered the happiness of Patmore’s fifteen years of marriage: In 1862, Emily died of tuberculosis.

Patmore never recovered from the death of his first wife. In spite of his two later marriages, it was to his first wife and marriage that he always looked when he sought inspiration. The emotional and spiritual completion—as well as the physical ecstacy—that he celebrated in The Angel in the House and later poems was never duplicated in his other unions.

For two years after Emily’s death, Patmore continued to work at the British Museum and sought to provide the warmth and guidance for his children that would have been given by Emily. In February, 1864, at the insistence of his friend Aubrey de Vere, he obtained a leave of absence and journeyed to Rome. There, the leanings he had felt even during his marriage to the stringently anti-Catholic Emily became irresistible and he converted to the Catholic Church, being received by a Jesuit, Father Cardella.

While in Rome, Patmore met his second wife, Marianne Byles. In a small comedy of errors, Patmore first proposed to her and then learned of her personal vow to become a nun. Thinking the vow irrevocable, he withdrew his proposal. When he learned that she could easily obtain a dispensation to revoke the vow, he proposed again and was accepted. Then he learned that she was not, as he had first assumed, the poor traveling companion of a wealthy woman but was the wealthy heiress herself. Again, he withdrew to protect his freedom of idea and propriety. His friends, however, urged him to reconsider, and he agreed to the marriage. He returned to England before Mary (as she was known) to prepare his children for their new mother. In July, 1864, they were married.

This second marriage produced no children, but it provided Patmore with the opportunity to purchase an estate of four hundred acres near Uckfield in Sussex, known as Heron’s Ghyll, into which his family and new wife moved in 1868; he had resigned from the British Museum in 1865. For six years, Patmore ran the estate successfully, surrounding himself with the comforts of the country and spending happy hours with his children and wife. He continued writing poetry and encouraged his wife in her literary project, a translation of Saint Bernard’s On the Necessity of Loving God (c. 1126-1141), which was later published. In 1874, Patmore sold Heron’s Ghyll to the duke of Norfolk for œ27,000, realizing a profit of œ8,500; he even published a pamphlet on his success as an estate manager. In 1875, the family moved to Hastings and remained there until 1891.

In 1877, Patmore published The Unknown Eros, and Other Odes, a series of odes dealing primarily with the nature of human and divine love. In the same year, he made a pilgrimage to Lourdes, after which he more fully devoted himself to the Blessed Virgin. In 1878, he published his final collection of poems, Amelia. After 1879, he wrote virtually no poetry, concentrating rather on expressing his difficult philosophy in prose.

Mary died in 1880. In 1881, Patmore married Harriet Robson, who had entered the household as a domestic during Mary’s final illness. In 1882, Emily, Patmore’s daughter, who had become a sister of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, died. One year later, Henry, the youngest of the six children by Emily, died. In that same year, Harriet gave birth to a child, Francis Epiphanius, known as Piffie. Patmore, already sixty, greatly enjoyed the delights of the child—delights that helped to offset the grief he suffered at the death of so many of his loved ones.

In 1891, the Patmores moved to Lymington, where Patmore spent the remaining five years of his life in virtual seclusion. He made occasional trips to London, wrote reviews and columns for the St. James’s Gazette, and continued writing prose, the first collection of which had been published in 1889 and the last of which would be published in 1895, a year before his death in 1896.

Analysis

The reasons for the oddly varying extremes of Coventry Patmore’s reputation are not hard to find. True to his contradictory nature, Patmore was a poet who could and did speak to the “common reader” in an intelligible manner, but he often spoke of mystical and esoteric subjects far beyond the grasp—or even concern—of that same reader. He gave his audience vignettes of domestic bliss—usually of the upper-middle-class variety—offering comfort in times that seemed to threaten the nuclear family and even the British Empire’s economic underpinnings, yet he included in these vignettes stark confrontations with emotional and spiritual absurdities intimately connected with the vicissitudes of love. Most significant, perhaps, he was able to couch profound psychological and emotional insights in apparently simple—and simplistic—aphorisms.

Patmore’s poetry gained for him his great popularity, but his thoughts were often more adaptable to prose. It was in his poetry, however, that he was best able to reveal his artistry and his philosophy in a harmonious blend of lyrical beauty and rich perception. His poetry had for its subject one idea: love. In fact, at least 95 percent of his poems deal with love in one form or another. From his earliest musings to his last philosophical treatises in verse, he was preoccupied with the manifestations of divine and human love.

Patmore’s early work betrayed his affinity with the Pre-Raphaelites in its overindulgence in description for description’s sake, especially in the overabundant use of adjectives before nouns and in the awkward use of Nature as a substantive character. By the time Patmore wrote The Angel in the House, however, he had much better control of his language. His style underwent further change and refinement so that by the time of The Unknown Eros, and Other Odes he had eliminated virtually all the verbal “deadwood” from his work; even when the language fails in concision, it is usually because the thought attempted is, in itself, incommunicable. Along with control of style, Patmore gained control of emotion. His late poetry best reveals this control when he treats subjects that would easily lend themselves to the worst excesses of Victorian sentimentalism.

Although Patmore was not a systematic philosopher, he was a profound and comprehensive thinker. He undertook to explain—as well as such a phenomenon could be explained—the very idea of love, easily the most irrational, mysterious, and misunderstood of human emotions. He went even further and attempted to explain the love between God and human beings in terms of human love. What Patmore attempted was explanation and not merely the ecstatic recounting of mystical experience. In order to explain, he believed that he first had to experience and then to know his subject (ironically, a very scientific attitude for someone who despised science). He used his life as such an experiment, and his poetry is his record of the results.

Early poems

Patmore began his poetic career, as did many of his contemporaries, under the influence of the burgeoning interest in the Middle Ages that had forced its way into many poems of the period. The poems in his first two volumes, published in 1844 and 1853, are filled with knights (both ancient and modern), long journeys on horseback through lush and wild countryside, and, of course, maidens and damsels in need of love or rescue. These early works are quite conventional and, frankly, dull. They attempt to deal with his favorite topic, love, but they stand too much in awe of the subject, afraid to assert with conviction any insight the young poet might have had. Rather, they present lovers meeting, wooing, wedding, and dying—and little else.

These poems are of interest, however, for what they reveal about Patmore’s increasing poetic abilities. The earliest of them, especially, are filled with excesses of description that reflect the poet’s immaturity and uncertainty. One example, from “The River,” will suffice;

The leafy summer-time is young;The yearling lambs are strong;The sunlight glances merrily;The trees are full of song;The valley-loving river flowsContentedly along.

It is significant to note that within six lines there are eight modifiers, words attempting to convey complete pictures in themselves but that, through their conventionality, become clichés. The diction fails to “paint” the kind of vivid word-picture the poet was aiming for. Between this early style and that of The Angel in the House, there is a tremendous gap—and one that shows how far Patmore had progressed by the time he published his most popular poem.

“A London Fête”

Of the early poems, however, one demands special attention. Titled “A London Fête,” this work of forty-seven lines of four-stress iamb rhymed variously in open quatrains and couplets is unusual for Patmore. The subject is a hanging at Newgate, attended by a mob of curious and excited people. The poem is stark and realistic in its presentation of the bloodthirsty nature of the people “enjoying” this spectacle. Mothers jostle with other mothers to give their babes a good view; young girls tear their garments to provide themselves with rags to wave; sots yell out the doomed man’s fate in Hell. The execution takes place, and the crowd releases a cry of joy. As they leave, one baby strings its doll to a stick, and the mother praises this “pretty trick.” Two children catch and hang a cat. A pickpocket slinks off to ply his trade elsewhere. Two friends chat amicably. Two people, who fought over the best vantage point, leave to settle their score “with murderous faces.”

The poem is an early revelation of Patmore’s elitist politics. Throughout his life, he feared (even hated) the idea of democracy and its resultant “mob.” The people depicted in this poem are that very mob: drunks, thieves, murderers, and, worst of all, mothers who do not know what is best for their children, or do not care. Although the poem gives voice to Patmore’s political prejudices, it is extremely effective nevertheless. Its style is compact and journalistic; its impact is heightened by its one figure of speech: a simile comparing the howling mob to the mob of damned souls in Hell as they rejoice over the addition of another to their fold. The condemnation conveyed is so complete as to disallow any attempt at rebuttal, poetic or otherwise. What is unusual about the poem, in addition to its not being about love, is that it is concerned with one specific event treated as such and left to stand on its own. Later in his career, Patmore seemed unable to isolate and then reincorporate specific events in his poetry. In seeking the significance of the event, he sometimes felt obliged to introduce a prologue (or several) or to elaborate on the event immediately on his telling it. One of the faults of The Angel in the House is this insistence on commentary of occasionally excessive length. That fault, however, is nowhere to be found in this early, and quite moving, poem of political and social contempt.

The Angel in the House

Patmore’s popularity as a poet was achieved with the publication of The Angel in the House. This was to be his epic poem celebrating love, woman, home, and God in six books. He finished only four of them, published separately between 1854 and 1862: The Betrothal, The Espousals, Faithful for Ever, and The Victories of Love, collectively published together as The Angel of the House in 1863. The first two books concern a happy marriage between two true lovers; the second two books concern a marriage that begins without mutual love but ends in a state of shared happiness; the final two books, one can conjecture, would have dealt with a good marriage gone bad or a bad marriage that remained bad.

The Angel in the House (the title applies to the first two books, The Betrothal and The Espousals, as well as to all four) is the story of the courtship and marriage of Felix and Honoria. The poem begins with a prologue set on their eighth anniversary and ends on their tenth. The two books, with their twelve cantos each, cover, respectively, the betrothal and the marriage. The poem is Felix’s gift to his wife, as a celebration of the bliss they have enjoyed and as a record of the emotions both felt throughout the course of their love and courtship. Each canto consists of a number of preludes (usually two, but no more than five) followed by an ode that contains the main “episode” or occurrence of that canto. These odes are divided into smaller numbered units. The rhyme is open quatrain and the meter is four-stress lines, usually iambic.

The cantos provide a roughly chronological account of the courtship and marriage; the chronologically arranged material falls within the odes, while the preludes range freely, dealing with any number of questions pertaining to love but always applying them to the coming incident. How this schema works can be seen, for example, in canto 6 of book 1, “The Dean,” in which Felix asks the Dean for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The first prelude, “Perfect Love Rare,” is a meditation on and apostrophe to love as well as a lament that, indeed, perfect (that is, pure) love is a “privilege high” to be enjoyed by only the few who merit such reward. The poet goes on to add that

A day [in love’s] delicious life Though full of terrors, full of tears,Is better than of other life A hundred thousand million years.

Thus, the opening prelude, through its conventional hyperbole, offers “evidence” of the rarity of perfect love (but, of course, hints that such rarity will be achieved in the coming match).

The next prelude, “Love Justified,” is simply that, a justification of the poet’s choice of a mate—as much choice, that is, as love allows. The poet concludes the prelude by claiming that his song will prove that “This little germ of nuptial love,/ . . ./ The root is . . ./ Of all our love to man and God.” From the seeking of the rare in the first prelude, the poet carries his readers in the second into the realm of the earthly and attainable and offers a “logical” justification for the action.

The third prelude, “Love Serviceable,” is an even more intense call to action. Here the poet asserts that the noble lover does not care about his own fate but only about the happiness of his beloved. His quest for her is, after all, to make her happy; failure in that quest would result in both his and her lack of fulfillment and joy. Thus, he must devote his full attention to obtaining his goal, for “He does not rightly love himself/ Who does not love another more.” Another strong reason for taking action is offered in this prelude as the canto progresses to the ode containing the action.

There is, however, one final prelude, “A Riddle Solved,” that reads:

Kind souls, you wonder why, love you, When you, you wonder why, love none. We love, Fool, for the good we do,Not that which unto us is done!

The riddle thus solved by the altruistic nature of true love, the canto moves to the ode, divided into four parts. Felix is visiting the Dean’s family. In the first part of the ode, the ladies leave to take tea outside. In the second part, the Dean and Felix make small talk over trifling matters. In the third part, Felix makes his plea for the daughter’s hand. In the fourth part, the Dean, giving him his best wishes, sends him out to woo Honoria, who is having tea. Thus, the canto focuses on the act of Felix’s seeking Honoria’s hand but prefaces that act with observations on the rarity of perfect love, justifications for pursuing such a rare phenomenon, and insights into the nature of true love in such pursuit. The reader is, then, quite prepared for the act and its outcome by these philosophical probings that stand at the head of each canto.

The relationship among the preludes and between the preludes and odes is well handled by Patmore and provides much of the structural integrity of this long, thoughtful poem. By including such preludes, Patmore is able to take incidents with apparent meaning and amplify or alter such meaning to suit his didactic purpose. Usually behind such manipulation is the motive of revealing something to the readers that should have been quite obvious but was hidden by the mundaneness of the everyday occurrence. Such insight is one of the strengths of the poem.

The mundaneness of the subject matter, however, contributes to the poem’s major flaw, and it is a significant one. Patmore was attempting to mold the everyday to the poetic and the poetic to the everyday. By further attempting to imitate the epic mode, he was forcing a gravity and significance on his subject matter that it simply could not bear.

The poem’s other principal fault—especially from a modern reader’s point of view—is the philosophy on which it is built, an extreme Victorian male chauvinism. Throughout the cantos there is constant reference to the most offensive stereotypes of women; they are foreign lands, whose customs can never be understood by men; they are frail children in need of paternalistic husbands; they are empty-headed vessels in need of men’s intelligence; they are objects to be sought and possessed; they are long-suffering companions put on earth to please their men; they are parts in need of a whole. In fairness to Patmore, it must be admitted that he viewed man as equally incomplete and dependent on woman for completion, but the poet insisted on basing his philosophy on “unequal equality,” and, to echo George Orwell, man was “more equal than woman”—at least in Patmore’s conservative worldview.

The Victories of Love

This male chauvinism is also apparent in The Victories of Love (the title used to refer collectively to the third and fourth books of The Angel in the House, Faithful for Ever and The Victories of Love). The poem, written as a series of verse letters, is not as successful as its predecessor. It lacks a true emotional focus, its style is much less direct, and its structure is not as tightly controlled. The two books consist of nineteen and thirteen letters, respectively, written in four-stress couplets. The effect of such a scheme is monotony, which further undercuts the impact of the poem.

The “victories” of the title refer to the effort of the two lovers whose story is unfolded through the many letters. Frederick Graham, a cousin of Honoria, is deeply in love with her when she weds Felix (at the close of The Angel in the House). He embarks on a long sea voyage to try to overcome his passion, but as his letters to his mother show, he is unable to do so. In desperation for “a change,” he marries Jane, whom he does not really love, although she grows to love him. The remainder of the poem recounts their marriage, the births and deaths of some of their children, and their “victories” in establishing first respect, then concern, and finally love for each other. Unfortunately, Jane dies, leaving Frederick with a still-unabated passion for Honoria, a passion he again tries to lose by going to sea. He does, however, see his remaining child married to Honoria’s (the subjects, perhaps, of the unwritten fifth and sixth books of the epic).

In this poem, Patmore attempts far too much. He tries to imitate prattling, gossipy old ladies in strictly rhymed couplets; he tries to convey genuine emotions regarding love and honor and felicity in verse letters; and he tries, again, to justify his view of women by placing too much of the philosophical burden on the shoulders of poor dying Jane, whose letters to her mother, mother-in-law, and husband just before her death do not escape the maudlin extremes that Patmore was usually able to avoid. Jane pleads with Frederick to accept that: “Image and glory of the man,/ As he of God, is woman. Can/ This holy, sweet proportion die/ Into a dull equality?” Perhaps Patmore himself realized the significant falling-off in effectiveness in these two books of his projected six and abandoned the idea of an epic on the Household of Love.

The Unknown Eros, and Other Odes

If The Angel in the House proved to be Patmore’s most popular work, his final major volume of poetry, The Unknown Eros, and Other Odes, has certainly proved to be his best collection. This volume, also published in two parts, consists of two books, the first containing a proem and twenty-four odes, the second eighteen odes. In these odes, Patmore, loosening the hold of traditional prosody, uses a variety of meters and rhyme schemes to treat his favorite topic—love—and his next-favorite topic—the political and social decline of England and its empire. As a poet of analogies, Patmore saw the similarities in his love for woman and for God and his love for his country. Likewise, he saw the decline and death of his beloved as a reflection of the decline and death of his beloved country, and vice versa. These analogies appear throughout the odes, both explicitly and implicitly. In fact, the poet boldly announces in the proem that it may be “England’s parting soul that nerves [his] tongue” and gives him the impetus to break his years of silence with these odes designed to restore to his beloved (woman and country) some of the luster lost by either death or dying.

Part of the strength of these odes lies in their variety of subject and mode. Here Patmore’s prosody, more relaxed and much more colloquial, comes closer to capturing the essence of speech he so vainly sought in his earlier works; these odes seem almost effortless in their flow and offer no resistance to the reader in terms of language. They may, however, continue to resist the reader in terms of the density of their thought, the political theories expounded, or the philosophical basis of the majority of the observations. In spite of such barriers, these odes succeed as no other of Patmore’s poems do in their eloquence, their emotional impact, and their profundity.

The first twelve odes in the first book form a thematic unit on love and denial of love by death; the odes are probably based on Patmore’s experience with his first wife, Emily. The first few odes focus on time and its passage. Beginning with the fifth ode, there is a distinct unit on his loss at the death of his wife, on his memory of her, on his fears and hopes, and on his remarriage. These poems are some of the finest Patmore wrote, containing emotions that manage to travel more than a century between then and now with grace and meaning. “The Azalea,” “Departure,” and, especially, “The Toys” show Patmore at his most mature and controlled; he is able, as few of his contemporaries were, to touch a poignant note lightly enough to allow the reverberations to have their full impact on the reader. There is moralizing here, and some preaching as well, but all is blended with a sensitivity unsurpassed in his other work, including his best prose. That sensitivity is well reflected in his superbly economical style; here is one example from “Eurydice,” in which he addresses his lost mate:

Thee, whom ev’n more than Heaven loved I have,And yet have not been trueEven to thee,I dreaming, night by night, seek now to see,And, in a mortal sorrow, still pursueThro’ sordid streets and lanes. . . .

Here, as in his earliest work, there is an abundance of modifiers; but now each one is charged with meaning, effectively holding readers before allowing them to move on to the next complementary and expansive link in an emotional chain.

True to his extremes, Patmore balances his best with some of his worst poetry in these odes. His political odes are not nearly as successful as the personal, nor are they, in themselves, good verse. They are marred by long-windedness, awkward lines, and, too often, repugnant ideas.

The second book of odes continues the mixture of personal and political observations but contains some of his most difficult work, the odes in which he uses the classical myths to expound his ideas on human and divine love. Some of them simply do not fulfill their intention, and most of the political odes are also unsuccessful. The personal poems, however, such as “The Child’s Purchase,” are generally very moving.

Later poems

After The Unknown Eros, and Other Odes, Patmore wrote very few poems, and these are generally rather bland when they are not offensive. For example, Amelia returns to the theme of the sacrificing woman and has a young girl weep over the grave of her lover’s former betrothed; that, however, is not enough: She actually takes the dead woman’s ring and swears to wear it for her sake because “dear to maidens are their rivals dead.” Here Patmore succeeds in straining—some would say rupturing—plausibility, as he does in “The Girl of All Periods,” in which a “feminist” who smokes cigarettes and reads George Sand is “put in her place” by a few sly male compliments.

Patmore insisted that his poetry was not original, in meter or insight. He even abhorred the charge of “originality” when he heard it applied to himself. By this insistence on drawing from wells already much frequented, Patmore placed himself as a poet in a very vulnerable position. Even profound insights can become monotonous if they are constantly delivered in simple aphorisms. To that temptation to be aphoristic, Patmore too often succumbed. It is unfortunate that so much of his best poetry and his best thought lie buried. Whether this arch-conservative Victorian poet’s work will again be popularly read is open to question. What is certain is this: His works deserve attention.

Bibliography

Anstruther, Ian. Coventry Patmore’s Angel: A Study of Coventry Patmore, His Wife Emily, and “The Angel in the House.” London: Haggerston Press, 1992. A short biographical study of Patmore and his wife. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Crook, J. Mordaunt. “Coventry Patmore and the Aesthetics of Architecture.” Victorian Poetry 34, no. 4 (Winter, 1996): 519-543. Crook discusses Patmore as an architectural critic of extraordinary power and perhaps the most eloquent expositor of architectural style.

Fisher, Benjamin F. “The Supernatural in Patmore’s Poetry.” Victorian Poetry 34, no. 4 (Winter, 1996): 544-557. An examination of supernaturalism in Patmore’s work. Suggests that careful readers will discover ghosts, vampires, and hauntings recurring in Patmore’s poetry.

Fontana, Ernest. “Patmore and Dickinson: Angels, Cochineal, and Polar Expiation.” Emily Dickinson Journal 13, no. 1 (2004): 1-18. Discusses Emily Dickinson’s familiarity with Patmore’s The Angel in the House and several poems she may have written in response to what she read in that collection.

Gosse, Edmund. Coventry Patmore. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905. The earliest book-length critical study published on Patmore, designed to complement the “official” biography of the Patmore family published by Basil Champneys. Full of anecdotes and personal accounts, it is nevertheless an important critical work on Patmore.

Oliver, E. J. Coventry Patmore. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1956. A short, accessible biography on Patmore. Discusses love as the focus of his life, his family, and his mystical leanings that put him at odds with clericalism. Examines the importance of place and background in his poems.

Pinch, Adela. “Love Thinking.” Victorian Studies 50, no. 3 (Spring, 2008): 379-397. This article on love in the Victorian era uses “The Kiss” from The Angel in the House as a starting point. Pinch does not like Patmore’s poetry and criticizes his choice of meter.

Reid, John Cowie. Mind and Art of Coventry Patmore. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957. This full-length study of Patmore explores the influences on Patmore and his thought, and his “doctrine” of love as expressed in his poems. Particularly noteworthy is the chapter on the odes. Includes an extensive bibliography.

Weinig, Mary Anthony. Coventry Patmore. Boston: Twayne, 1981. An appreciative introduction to Patmore, noting that his poems are “rooted in immediate experience of life and love and marriage.” Contains strong critical commentary on The Angel in the House and Faithful for Ever. Includes a separate section on his odes, which Weinig considers the best access to Patmore for the modern reader.