Coventry Patmore

Coventry Patmore (1823-1896). Portrait by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), circa 1890. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore (23 July 1823 - 26 November 1896) was an English poet and literary critic.

Life

Overview

Patmore was born at Woodford, Essex, son of Peter George Patmore, also an author. He was in the printed book department of the British Museum. He published Tamerton Church Tower (1853), and between 1854 and 1862 the 4 poems which, combined, form his masterpiece, The Angel in the House, a poetic celebration of married love. In 1864 he entered the Church of Rome. Thereafter he published The Unknown Eros (1877), Amelia (1878), and Rod, Root, and Flower (1895), meditations chiefly on religious subjects. His works are full of graceful and suggestive thought, but occasionally suffer from length and discursiveness. He was successful in business matters, and in character was energetic, masterful, and combative. He numbered Tennyson and Ruskin among his friends, was associated with the pre-Raphaelites, and was a contributor to their organ, the Germ.

Youth

Patmore, the eldest son of author Peter George Patmore, was born at Woodford in Essex. He was privately educated with no view to any special profession; in the main his own teacher, but, as he warmly acknowledged, profiting greatly by his father's precepts regarding English literature.

It was his earliest ambition to become an artist, and he showed much promise, being awarded the silver palette of the Society of Arts in 1838. In the following year he was sent to school in France, where he studied for 6 months, and began to write poetry. On his return his father contemplated the publication of some of these youthful poems; but in the meanwhile Coventry had evinced a passion for science, and the poetry was set aside.

He addicted himself for a time to scientific pursuits, and afterwards thought of taking holy orders, but was discouraged partly by his father's inability to support him at the university, partly by scruples relating solely to the position of the church of England; for, although his father was a free-thinker, his own studies and reflections had already reconciled him to orthodox Christianity.

Drawing by John Brett (1831-1902), 1855. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Early career

In 1844 he published a small volume of Poems, which was not without individuality, but marred by inequalities of workmanship. It brought a letter of warm praise and sound advice from Bulwer, and an absurd denunciation enlivened by a clever parody from Blackwood, but otherwise attracted little notice beyond the author's own circle. Patmore, distressed at its reception, bought up the remainder of the edition and caused it to be destroyed. What chiefly wounded him was the cruel review in Blackwood, written in the worst style of unreasoning abuse; but the enthusiasm of private friends, together with their wiser criticism, did much to help him and to foster his talent.

Indeed, the publication of this little volume bore immediate fruit in introducing its author to various men of letters, among whom was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, through whose offices Patmore became known to Holman Hunt, and was thus drawn into the eddies of the pre-Raphaelite movement, contributing his poem “The Seasons” to The Germ.

In 1845 the financial embarrassment of Patmore's father, due to unfortunate railway speculations, threw him entirely upon his own resources. Up to this time his circumstances had been good, and he had made no serious effort to earn a living. He now earned a scanty subsistence by translations and contributions to periodicals.

In November 1846, the recommendation of Richard Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), at the instance of Mrs. Procter, obtained for him an appointment as assistant in the printed book department of the British Museum. The post was congenial to Patmore, and he proved himself highly efficient. He appears to have about this time assisted Milnes in the preparation of the Life and Letters of Keats (1848), but to what extent is difficult to determine. No part of it can have been written by him.

Emily Patmore (1824-1862). Portrait by John Everett Millais (1829–1896). Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Marriage

Feeling now comparatively at ease in his circumstances, he married, in September 1847, Emily Augusta Andrews (born 29 February 1824), daughter of a congregationalist minister, a lady with mental and personal charms beyond the common, and a model of gracious geniality and clear common sense.

She was herself the author of some small useful books, under the pseudonym of "Mrs. Motherly," and assisted her husband in the compilation of his excellent collection of poetry for children, The Children's Garland, published in 1862. The union was most happy, although the cares and expenses of an increasing family, and, after a time, of Mrs. Patmore's declining health, frequently made Patmore's situation one of considerable anxiety.

He never compromised his independence, and laboured hard to provide for his family by writing in reviews, especially the Edinburgh and North British, efforts the more creditable as the work was uncongenial to him. He lacked the first qualification of a literary critic, sympathy with his author. An egotist and a mystic, he could take no vital interest in any one's ideas but his own, and hence his treatment of other authors is in general unsatisfactory: while his fine taste, intuitive insight, and careful study of aesthetic laws frequently render his isolated observations of great value.

An exception to this habitual indifference to other men's work was the admiration he at this time entertained for Tennyson, with whom he had as much interaction as the elder poet's distance from town and dislike to letter-writing would allow. Another friendship, which had more important results, was his acquaintance with Ruskin, who had been the pupil of Mrs. Patmore's father; Ruskin's enthusiasm for architecture was fully shared by Patmore, who wrote on this subject with far more enjoyment and spontaneity than upon literature.

Patmore had made in 1849 the acquaintance of the pre-Raphaelite group of artists, with whom he had much in common, and to whose organ, The Germ, he contributed a remarkable essay on Macbeth, as well as verses. They were almost succumbing to the universal hostility aroused by their originality and their peculiarities, when, at Patmore's prompting, Ruskin wrote the memorable letter to the Times which turned the tide of public opinion.

Another important service rendered by Patmore was his promotion of the volunteer movement after Louis Napoleon's coup d'état in December 1851. Others came forward simultaneously, but the idea was original with him.

Meanwhile, neither private cares nor public interests had interrupted Patmore's poetical work. In 1853 he republished, in Tamerton Church Tower, the more successful pieces from the Poems of 1844, adding several new poems which showed distinct advance, both in conception and treatment. The volume reached a 2nd edition in the same year.

In the following year (1854) appeared the opening part of his best known poem, The Angel in the House, which was continued in The Espousals (1856), Faithful for Ever (1860), and The Victories of Love (1862).

Patmore's character was curiously unlike the idea of it generally derived from The Angel in the House. Instead of an insipid amiability, his dominant characteristic was a rugged angularity, steeped in Rembrandt-like contrasts of light and gloom. Haughty, imperious, combative, sardonic, he was at the same time sensitive, susceptible, and capable of deep tenderness. He was at once magnanimous and rancorous; egotistic and capriciously generous; acute and credulous; nobly veracious and prone to the wildest exaggerations, partly imputable to the exuberance of his quaint humour. His capacity for business was as remarkable as his intellectual strength, and was not like this warped and flawed by eccentricity.

2nd marriage

If Patmore retained any desire to pursue the subject of connubiality further, it must have been checked by his irreparable loss in the death of his wife on 5 July 1862. She had long been sinking from consumption, and her life had been prolonged only by his devoted care. She left him 3 sons and 3 daughters.

His feelings found an inadequate expression in The Victories of Love, but he had reached the turning-point of his career, and the break with his past was irreparable. He went abroad for his health, embraced (1864) the Roman catholic religion, which he would probably have professed many years earlier but for the influence of his wife, and found a second mate in Marianne Caroline Byles (born 23 June 1822), a lady of noble though reserved manners, and singular moral excellence. His family followed his example, and with the exception of 2 sons old enough to go forth into life, and a daughter who after a while entered a convent, remained under his roof.

He retired from the British Museum, and, after short residences in Hampstead and Highgate, bought the estate to which he gave the name of Heron's Ghyll, near Uckfield in Sussex. This he so improved by building and planting as to be able after some years to dispose of it at a greatly enhanced price. He then settled at The Mansion, Hastings, a fine old house which had attracted his fancy when a child.

In 1877 he wrote a memoir of his old friend Bryan Waller Procter, at the desire of Mrs. Procter.

Tranquillity and retirement had brought back the poetical impulse. In 1877 appeared The Unknown Eros, which unquestionably contains his finest work in poetry, and in the following year Amelia, his own favourite among his poems, together with an interesting, though by no means indisputable, essay on "English Metrical Law."

He meditated a much more ambitious poem, which, taking the Virgin for its theme, was to have embodied his deepest convictions on things divine and human. Finding the necessary inspiration denied, he recorded his thoughts in a prose volume entitled Sponsa Dei, which he ultimately destroyed, professedly upon a hint from a Jesuit that he was divulging to the uninitiated what was intended for the elect, but in reality, no doubt, because he had failed to satisfy himself; and partly, perhaps, from apprehension of censure in his own communion.

His relations with the church of which he had become a member were curious; he detested and despised her official head in his own country, abused the priesthood as individuals, and made no point of the pope's temporal power, while he performed 4 pilgrimages to Lourdes, and desired to be buried in the garb of a Franciscan friar. There can be no question of the perfect sincerity of his Roman catholic profession, and as little that this was but the exterior manifestation of the mysticism which, as he tells us in an interesting autobiographical fragment, had possessed his being from his youth.

Last years

Patmore's latter years passed in tranquility, except for family bereavements. In 1880 he lost his second wife, in memory of whom he erected an imposing Roman catholic church at Hastings, designed by Mr. Basil Champneys, afterwards his biographer. In 1882 his daughter Emily died, and in 1883 his son Henry. In 1881 he married Miss Harriet Robson, by whom he had a son. In 1891 a change in the ownership of his Hastings residence obliged him to move, and he settled at Lymington.

His poetical works were definitively collected in 1886, with a valuable appendix on English metrical law, enlarged from an early essay in the North British Review.

About 1885 he became a frequent contributor of essays and reviews to the St. James's Gazette, then edited by his friend, Frederick Greenwood. Selections from these contributions, with additions from other sources, were published in 1889 and 1893, under the respective titles of Principle in Art and Religio Poetae.

In 1895 Patmore published Rod, Root, and Flower, observations and meditations, chiefly on religious subjects, which probably embody much of the destroyed Spousa Dei.

He died at Lymington after a brief attack of pneumonia on 26 November 1896.

Writing

Poetry

Patmore is today among the least known, but best-regarded Victorian poets. His inequality of character is reflected in his poetry. Nobody had sounder views on the laws of art, no one strove more earnestly after worthiness of subject and unity of impression, and yet the themes of all his objective poems are trivial or unsuited to his purpose, and his subjective pieces, with few exceptions, attract chiefly by the beauty of isolated details. He was the last man to write, as he aspired to do, the poem of his age, but no contemporary poet offers such a multitude of thoughts "as clear as truth, as strong as light," and descriptions of exquisite charm and photographic accuracy, easily detached from their context and remembered for their own sakes.

A collected edition of his poems appeared in 2 volumes in 1886, with a characteristic preface which might serve as the author's epitaph. "I have written little," it runs; "but it is all my best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared time or labour to make my words true. I have respected posterity; and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me." The obvious sincerity which underlies this statement, combined with a certain lack of humour which peers through its naïveté, points to 2 of the principal characteristics of Patmore's earlier poetry; characteristics which came to be almost unconsciously merged and harmonized as his style and his intention drew together into unity.

Early poems

In 1844 he published a slender volume containing, with minor pieces, 4 narrative poems – "The River," "The Woodman's Daughter," "Lilian," and "Sir Hubert" – strikingly original and individual in style and thought, though with traces of Tennyson and Coleridge. As narratives they are wholly uninteresting, almost vapid; but the weakness of construction is relieved by strokes of psychological insight and descriptive power altogether surprising at the author's age. In many respects the volume anticipated the principles and the work of the pre-Raphaelites in another sphere of art, and paved the way for the writer's subsequent relations with the leaders of that movement.

In 1853 he published Tamerton Church Tower, which he had begun as early as 1848. Like his former productions, it is a narrative poem, and as such quite pointless and uninteresting, but full of exquisite vignettes of scenery. The volume, which reached a second edition in the same year, included revised versions of the poems of 1844 and new pieces, some of great beauty.

The Angel in the House

Among these were specimens of The Angel in the House, the long poem now occupying all the time and thought he could devote to it, and designed to be the apotheosis of married love.

The first part, The Betrothal, was published anonymously in 1854. The anonymity was owing to Patmore's alarm at the unfavourable reception of his father's book, My Friends and Acquaintance, published earlier in the same year. The name alone, he fancied, would condemn him; although, as portions of the poem had already appeared in Tamerton Church Tower, his precaution was in reality quite futile. It would have been wiser to disarm criticism by removing the numerous trivialities which disfigured a beautiful poem; but this could not be expected, for Patmore could not see them.

He had no perception of the sublime in other men's writings or of the ridiculous in his own. The great writers whom he sincerely admired were admired by him for any other quality than their grandeur; and although the reverse of conceited as regarded his own works, and continually labouring to amend their defects, the worst defect they had was never admitted by him. Although, however, the Angel's occasional lapses into bathos afforded a handle to detractors, the voice of the higher criticism was always for it.

Tennyson, Browning, Ruskin, Carlyle were lavish of sincere praise, and even its commercial success (though the author himself was disappointed) was greater than could have been reasonably expected in the case of a book so entirely original and so devoid of meretricious allurement. The Betrothal was followed in 1856 by The Espousals (new editions of both parts appeared in 1858, 1863 two ed., and 1866) ; in 1860 by Faithful for Ever, a poem of disappointed love; and in 1862 by The Victories of Love, a poem of bereavement. In the collected edition of his works Faithful for Ever was amalgamated with The Victories of Love.

It must be said that the quality of poetical achievement went on decrescendo, though there are exceedingly fine things in Faithful for Ever. The 4 poems nevertheless constitute among them such a body of deep and tender and truly poetical thought on love and lovers, embellished with charming pictures of English scenery and household life, as no other poet has given us.

The obvious and unanswerable criticism is that the poet's professed subject of married life is only approached in the least successful parts of the poem, and hardly grappled with even there. The reason is plain: its domesticities were found incapable of poetical treatment.

The Unknown Eros

In 1868 he had printed for private circulation 9 odes, remarkable alike for their poetry and for their metrical structure, or rather, perhaps, their musical beauty in the absence of definite metrical form. They may be regarded as rhythmical voluntaries, in which the length of the lines and the incidence of the rhymes are solely determined by the writer's instinctive perception of the requirements of harmony, and the rich and varied music thus attained contrasted no less strikingly with the metrical simplicity of The Angel in the House than did the frequent loftiness of the thoughts and audacity of the diction with the quiet feeling and unostentatious depth of the earlier work.

Other similar compositions were gradually added, and in the collective edition of the poet's works in 1877 the whole took shape as The Unknown Eros, and other odes (another edit. 1878; 3rd edit. 1890), 42 odes in 2 books.

His best work is found in The Unknown Eros, which is full not only of passages but of entire poems in which exalted thought is expressed in poetry of the richest and most dignified melody. Spirituality informs his inspiration; the poetry is glowing and alive. The magnificent piece in praise of winter, the solemn and beautiful cadences of "Departure," and the homely but elevated pathos of "The Toys," are in their manner unsurpassed in English poetry. His somewhat reactionary political opinions, which also find expression in his odes, are perhaps a little less inspired, although they can certainly be said to reflect, as do his essays, a serious, and very active, mind.

It is not likely that these will ever attain the popularity eventually won by The Angel in the House, nor are they nearly so well adapted for "human nature's daily food." But they frequently exhibit the poet at greater heights than he had reached before, or without them would have been deemed capable of reaching; and the lofty themes and fine metrical form have in general acted as an antidote to his worst defect, his tendency to lapse into prose. The effusions of inward feeling, frequently most pathetic in expression, and the descriptions of external nature, of mirrorlike fidelity, are alike admirable, and often transcendently beautiful. The weak parts are the expressions of political and ecclesiastical antipathies, mere splenetic outbursts alike devoid of veracity and of dignity; and a few mystical pieces in which, endeavouring to express things incapable of expression, the poet has only accumulated glittering but frigid conceits.

The gulf between The Angel in the House and the Odes is partly filled by Amelia, first published in 1878, an exquisite little idyll akin to the former in subject, and to the latter in metrical structure, and not unjustly esteemed by the author his most perfect work.

Prose

His prose style, without attaining to eloquence, which he never attempted, is a pattern of dignified simplicity, and of lucidity slightly tinted by the hues of feeling. His critical powers were of the highest, but were impaired by his besetting sin of egotism. A few of the greatest writers excepted, he could take no strong interest in any man's work but his own; his attitude towards other men's ideas was that of Omar towards the Alexandrian library, and his essays on their writings affect with a painful sense of inadequacy. They are, nevertheless, well worth reading for the detached remarks, often most subtle and penetrating.

His religious and moral aphorisms also have much worth: and this is even more true of those casually expressed in the fragments of correspondence published by Mr. Champneys than of those which he himself gave to the world. In other departments of thought he is little better than a wasted force, chiefly on account of his disharmony with his own age.

Critical introduction

by Edmund Gosse

When, in 1886, Patmore rightly judged that he had closed his task as a poet, he solemnly recorded that he had

traversed the ground and reached the end which, in my youth, I saw before me. I have written little, but it is all my best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared time or labour to make my words true. I have respected posterity, and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me.

When he wrote these words he had been a practising poet for 47 years, but with long intervals of silence and retirement. It was part of Coventry Patmore’s intellectual creed to regard the writing of verse as by no means the exclusive or perhaps even main occupation of a poet. Hence he was content to spend months and even years in meditation, during which he filled the cells of his nature with the material for poetry. Between the ages of thirty and forty he composed steadily, though even then not abundantly; while, during all the other years of his life, his actual writing was performed at long intervals, in feverish spurts. This mode of production is worthy of notice in Patmore’s case, because of the extraordinary concentration of his thought and will on the vocation of the poet. The intention to write was never out of his mind, and yet he had the power of will to refuse himself the satisfaction of writing except on those rare occasions when he felt capable of doing his best.

From childhood to the grave Patmore was supported and impelled by the conviction that he had a certain mission to perform. His sense of how this was to be carried out became modified, but of the mission itself he never had the slightest doubt. He believed himself to be called upon to celebrate Nuptial Love, “the more serious importance of which had been singularly missed by most poets of all countries,” as he told Aubrey de Vere in 1850. As time went on, this theme became rarified and spiritualized in his mind; it took more and more a sacramental character. What had begun with the simple amativeness of Tamerton Church-Tower closed in the Catholic transcendentalism of the Eros and Psyche odes. “At nine years old I was Love’s willing Page,” he said in his youth, and in his final maturity he declared that “Love makes life to be a fount perpetual of virginity.” The point of view changed, the essential conviction was the same.

The Angel in the House

It is plain that at the opening of his career Patmore conceived that to carry out his scheme with any measure of success it would be necessary to adopt an objective treatment. The mere subjective method, the lyrical cry of the enamoured youth in person, would not be suitable, because so obvious in expression and so easily misconstrued. The crude and flat romances of 1844, "Lilian" and "Sir Hubert," which he so carefully suppressed; the less garrulous but highly sentimental "The River" and "The Woodman’s Daughter", which he laboriously re-wrote and condensed; have the value of showing us that from his boyhood, Patmore determined to make verse-narrative the vehicle of his message to mankind.

There could really be only one story of fortunate nuptial love, and when he finally adopted a form of it, it turned out, rather exasperatingly, to resemble the scenario of some novel by Anthony Trollope or Miss Charlotte Yonge. This quality, the trivial realism of the narrative in The Angel of the House, attracted a multitude of readers and at the same time obscured the splendour of the essential part of the poem, so that the very popularity of Patmore’s great undertaking delayed and falsified his ultimate success. That success consisted, not in the mild adventures of Honoria and her spouse, but in the magnificence of the philosophical episodes, in which the psychology of love is illustrated in language of great originality and with turns of the most felicitous fancy.

The link between the finished, or at least suspended, Angel in the House and the transcendental Odes which closed Patmore’s poetical career, is to be found in Amelia, in which something of the earlier narrative manner is retained, but where utterance of studied simplicity is abruptly abandoned in favour of a brocaded splendour of language. Instead of the light and fluent octosyllabics of The Angel in the House Patmore now adopted, and continued to the end to use, a sort of canzone or false Pindaric, the theory of which he defended with ardour, but of which there is little more to be said than that it justifies itself by enshrining much of the noblest of his own poetry. Amelia is a variant of the universal Patmore theme, the superficial instinct of human desire being depicted as mirroring the profound passion of heavenly love; the poem is distinguished from its predecessors by a greater audacity of expression, illustrated by an extreme vividness of colouring; and from its long series of successors by the fact that it preserves an objective attitude, which Patmore thereafter almost completely abandoned.

The Unknown Eros

We are now at liberty to turn to the product of Patmore’s later years, to The Unknown Eros and the various fragments which are dependent on that group of poems. This body of verse consists of about fifty odes of various length, all in the Pindaric form which has been mentioned above. There is reason to suppose that these poems should be regarded as fragments of a great work which Patmore began to design after his retirement from official life and settlement at Heron’s Ghyll. This followed upon his admission into the Roman Catholic Church and his visit to Rome in 1864. It is believed that he intended to write a sort of spiritual autobiography, in the form of a celebration of the beauty of service to the Blessed Virgin.

He did not, however, speak out very plainly about his intention, and we have to deal with the numbers of The Unknown Eros as we find them. What, then, we find is a series of lyrics, written in what he called “catalectic” metre, very different in subject, but similar in their earnest and uplifted emotion, in their mystical symbolism, and in their total independence of all contemporary influences. In The Angel in the House an unconscious emulation with Tennyson had been apparent; the odes faintly recall Milton and Cowley, but contain scarcely an echo of any more recent voice.

The contrast between the new rapture and the apparent levity of the old narrative manner was so great as to blind the earliest readers of the odes to their quality. Patmore privately printed an instalment of nine of these in 1868 and distributed them among his friends, not one of whom seems to have perceived their merit. It is true that his selection was from among the most abstruse and least attractive of the poems, but it included so amusing a fling at science as "The Two Deserts" and so splendid an example of Patmore’s highest lyrical achievement as (what has since been known as) "Deliciae Sapientiae de Amore." No one, at all events, was pleased or even interested, and the poet, excessively chagrined, rended and burned the remainder of the 1868 edition. He went on writing, however, and by the time when, in 1877, he published The Unknown Eros, the eyes of a new generation had been opened to the majesty of his vision and the penetration of his thought.

The odes of The Unknown Eros are now introduced by a “Proem” which gives a somewhat inexact impression of what is to follow. It insists to excess on the political character of the work, which is only part of the revelation in it of Patmore’s private convictions. He took a very dark view of the social and political condition of England fifty years ago, and was inclined to look upon himself as the only inspired prophet of her melancholy future:

“Mid the loud concert harsh

Of this fog-folded marsh,

To me, else dumb,

Uranian Clearness, come!”

he sang with tragic fatalism. But England contrived to escape the horrors of his prognostication, and the political portions of The Unknown Eros are now not impressive. They are, fortunately, not numerous; and the reader turns from them to the odes in which the poet reveals his own experience, often, as in St. Valentine’s Day, with a Wordsworthian felicity, and amid a profusion of beautiful landscape touches. Even more charming are the odes devoted to sentiments of remorse, of recollection or of poignant desiderium, the hopeless longing for a vanished face. In these categories The Azalea, The Toys, and Departure rank among the finest examples remaining to us of pure Victorian poetry.

But some parts of The Unknown Eros, and especially of the Second Book, are much more abstruse. In these sacramental odes, Patmore is often metaphysical, and sometimes dark with excess of ingenuity. His mystical Catholic poetry is inspired by a study of St. Thomas Aquinas among the ancients and of St. John of the Cross among the moderns. As he pursued his lonely meditations, his odes became more and more exclusively occupied with the religious symbolism of sex, culminating in The Child’s Purchase and in De Natura Deorum. Perhaps in the latest of all his poems — in The Three Witnesses (originally called Scire Teipsum), written in 1880 — Patmore carries his mystical ecstasy to its most transcendental height, where few can follow him. It is strange to contrast the almost puerile simplicity of his early narrative manner with the harsh and incisive arrogance of his latest lyrics, yet there is a unity running through the whole of Patmore’s work which is that of a highly original and passionate writer to whom scarcely anything was denied except pertinacity in the art of construction.

Recognition

Patmore's portrait, painted in 1894 by Mr. J. S. Sargent, R.A., is in the National Portrait Gallery. Several other portraits, as well as likenesses of members of his family, are reproduced in Mr. Champnevs's biography.

5 of his poems ("The Married Lover," "'If I were dead'," "Departure," "The Toys," and "A Farewell") were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

In popular culture

Patmore was caricatured as the unpleasant poet "Carleon Anthony" in Joseph Conrad's 1913 novel, Chance.

In X-Men: Season 1 Episode 1, Patmore's poem "Farewell", from The Unknown Eros, is paraphrased by the character Beast: "The faint heart averted many feet and many a tear, in our opposed path to persevere." The character also follows the quote with, "A minor poet for a minor obstacle."

Publications

Coventry Patmore, Poetry of Pathos and Delight, 1896. Courtesy Internet Archive.

Poetry

• Poems. London: Edward Moxon, 1844; London: George Bell, 1886.
• Tamerton Church-Tower, and other poems. London: William Pickering, 1853.
• The Angel in the House,
  • Book I: The Betrothal (anonymous). London: J.W. Parker, 1854.
  • Book I: The Betrothal & Book II: The Espousal. London: J.W. Parker, 1856; Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1856.
  • Faithful for Ever. London J.W. Parker, 1860; Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1861.
  • The Victories of Love. Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham, 1862.
  • Books I-IV. London & Cambridge, UK: Macmillan, 1863. Volume I - Book I: The Betrothal; Book II: The Espousal; Volume II - Book I: Faithful for Ever; Book II: The Victories of Love. 
• The Unknown Eros, and other odes London: George Bell.
  • Odes I-XXXI. 1877.
  • Odes I-XLVI. 1878.
• Florilegium Amantis (edited by Richard Garnett). London: George Bell, 1879.
• The Victories of Love, and other poems. London & New York: Cassell, 1888.
• Poetry of Pathos and Delight (edited by Alice Meynell). London: William Heinemann, 1896.
• Selected Poems (edited by Derek Patmore). London: Chatto & Windus, 1931.
• A Selection of Poems (edited by Derek Patmore). London: Grey Walls Press, 1948.
• Poems (edited by Frederick Page). London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1949.

Non-fiction

• How I Managed and Improved my Estate. London: George Bell, 1886.
• Principle in Art, etc. London: George Bell, 1889; London: Duckworth, 1913.
• Religio Poetae, etc. London: George Bell, 1893.
• The Rod, the Root, and the Flower. London: George Bell, 1895.
  • Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1968.
• Courage in Politics, and other essays, 1885-1896. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1921; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1968.
• Essay on English Metrical Law: A critical edition with commentary (edited by Mary Augustine Roth). Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1961.

Edited

• Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall), An Autobiographical Fragment: With biographical notes. London: George Bell, 1877,
• The Children's Garland, from the best poets. London: Macmillan, 1882.

Letters and journals

• Memoirs and Correspondence (edited by Basil Champneys). London: George Bell, 1900.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

Coventry Patmore ~ The Toys poem with text

• List of British poets
• List of literary critics
• Timeline of British poetry

References

•  Garnett, Richard (1901). "Patmore, Coventry Kersey Dighton". In Sidney Lee. Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement​. 3. London: Smith, Elder. pp. 249-252.  . Wikisource, Web, Feb. 18, 2018.
•  Waugh, Arthur (1911). "Patmore, Coventry Kersey Dighton". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 20 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 928. . Wikisource, Web, Feb. 26, 2017.

External links

Poems

• "In a Wood"
• Coventry Patmore 1823-1896 at the Poetry Foundation
• "The Two Deserts:" Poem of the Week at The Guardian
• Patmore in A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895: from The Angel in the House, "The Girl of All Periods," from The Unknown Eros, "Regina Coeli"
• Patmore, Coventry (1823-1896) (4 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
• Patmore in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900: "The Married Lover," "'If I were dead'," "Departure," "The Toys," and "A Farewell".
• Coventry Patmore in the Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse: "Life of Life," "Vesica Piscis," "Sponsa Dei," "To the Body".
• Patmore in The English Poets: An anthology: "Eros," "Night and Sleep," "Extract from Tamerton Church Tower, Extract from Amelia,
  • Extracts from The Angel in the House: The Poet's Confidence, Love at Large, The Lover, The Revelation, The Amaranth, Love's Perversity
  • Extracts from The Unknown Eros: Winter,The Azalea, Departure, The Toys, To the Body
• Coventry Patmore at PoemHunter (77 poems)
• Coventry Patmore at Poetry Nook (78 poems)

Audio / video

• Coventry Patmore poems at YouTube

Books

• Works by Coventry Patmore at Project Gutenberg
• Coventry Patmore at Amazon.com

About

• Coventry Patmore in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Coventry Patmore at NNDB
• Coventry Patmore in the Catholic Encyclopedia.
• Coventry Patmore at the Victorian Web.
• Coventry Patmore.by Edmund Gosse

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement (edited by Sidney Lee)​. London: Smith, Elder, 1901. Original article is at: Patmore, Coventry Kersey Dighton
 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the 1911 Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Original article is at Patmore, Coventry Kersey Dighton