Poet, born in Woodford, Essex, SE England, UK. He was assistant librarian at the British Museum, and associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His major work, The Angel in the House (185462), describing married love, was followed by the death of his wife Emily in 1862, and his conversion to Catholicism under the influence of Marianne, who became his second wife. Thereafter he wrote mainly on mystical or religious themes, as in the Unknown Eros (1877).
Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore (July 23, 1823 - November 26, 1896) was an English poet and critic.
The eldest son of Peter George Patmore, himself an author, Coventry was born at Woodford in Essex. In the following year he was sent to school in France for six months, where he began to write poetry. but meanwhile Coventry had become interested in science and the poetry was set aside.
He soon returned to literary interests, moved towards them by the sudden success of Alfred Lord Tennyson; The publication of this volume bore immediate fruit in introducing its author to various men of letters, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, through whom Patmore became known to William Holman Hunt, and was thus drawn into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, contributing his poem "The Seasons" to The Germ.
At this time Patmore's father was financially embarrassed; and in 1846 Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton obtained for Coventry the post of assistant librarian in the British Museum, a post he occupied for nineteen years, devoting his spare time to poetry.
In the next year 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; and in the following year (1854) appeared the first 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).
In 1865 he married again, his second wife being Marianne Byles, daughter of James Byles of Bowden Hall, Gloucester; 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 essay on English Metrical Law. His second wife died in 1880, and in the next year he married Harriet Robson.
A collected edition of his poems appeared in two volumes in 1886, with a characteristic preface which might serve as the author's epitaph. The obvious sincerity which underlies this statement, combined with a certain lack of humour which peers through its naïveté, points to two of the principal characteristics of Patmore's earlier poetry;
His best work is found in the volume of odes called 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. 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 various manners unsurpassed in English poetry.
His son, Henry John Patmore (1860-1883), was also a poet.
Trivia
Coventry Patmore was caricatured as the unpleasant poet Carleon Anthony in Joseph Conrad's novel Chance (1913).
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