Coventry Patmore

Coventry Patmore (born July 23, 1823, Woodford, Essex, England—died November 26, 1896, Lymington, Hampshire) was an English poet and essayist whose best poetry is in The Unknown Eros, and Other Odes, containing mystical odes of divine love and of married love, which he saw as a reflection of Christ’s love for the soul.

After his father fled to France to escape his creditors, Patmore obtained a position in the library of the British Museum, London, and worked there for 19 years. He published a vast novel in verse, telling the story of two marriages, beginning in the 1850s with The Angel in the House, consisting of The Betrothal (1854) and The Espousals (1856), and continuing with The Victories of Love (1863), consisting of Faithful for Ever (1860) and The Victories of Love (1863).

The Unknown Eros appeared in 1877 but, despite the originality of the poems, was not widely appreciated. Amelia (1878) virtually ended Patmore’s poetic output, and in later years he concentrated on essays—original and provocative—on literature, art, philosophy, and politics, chiefly for the St. James’s Gazette and later partly collected in Principle in Art (1889) and Religio Poetae (1893). His last work was a collection of aphorisms, The Rod, the Root, and the Flower (1895). Patmore’s seminal study of English Metrical Law (1857) was greatly admired by Gerard Manley Hopkins.