Coventry Patmore

Coventry Patmore by Alice Meynell

Alice Meynell’s “Coventry Patmore” is a fervent critical defense of Patmore as a major, under-recognized poet, especially as the author of *The Unknown Eros*. Meynell argues that Patmore’s odes possess the qualities of “classic” poetry: not academic polish or popularity, but the complete fusion of thought and word into a living, vital form. She predicts that a future age with finer critical intelligence may recognize his greatness, though his poetry will probably always remain lonely, demanding, and read by few. The essay emphasizes the solitude of Patmore’s poetic achievement. His odes are difficult not because they are confused, but because they move through rare spiritual and emotional experiences. Meynell distinguishes his obscurity from grammatical muddle: Patmore’s diction is pure and controlled, but his meanings can be inward, mystical, and remote. Poems such as “The Unknown Eros,” “Deliciae Sapientiae de Amore,” and “Arbor Vitae” may need explanation; yet others, including “Eurydice,” “Departure,” “If I were dead,” and “Saint Valentine’s Day,” are fully intelligible to readers truly alive to poetry. Meynell singles out *Eurydice* as a supreme poem of mourning, built on the terrible emotional formula “After exceeding ill, a little good.” It renders the dream-life of grief, in which the mourner finds the dead existing in a thin, remote, sorrowful survival. She also praises “The Day after To-morrow” for uniting terror and joy in its vision of reunion after death. Patmore’s greatness lies in the controlled force of such poems: they pierce the heart not through violence, but through mastered intensity. The essay also treats Patmore’s relation to nature. Meynell says he rarely “described” nature in the ordinary sense. Instead, he used natural images as sudden revelations, often shaped by scientific knowledge and spiritual perception. His imagery of sea, wind, birds, light, hills, and stars is praised for freshness and insight rather than decorative detail. Nature in Patmore becomes a vehicle of inward knowledge. Meynell defends *The Angel in the House* against the charge that its domestic and social world is unpoetic. She argues that Patmore did not accept the modern embarrassment about ordinary civilized life. He believed love, childhood, immortality, and spiritual experience could exist within conventional domestic settings, and he wrote of those conventions with realism rather than sentimentality. The “Angel,” she suggests, should be understood not simply as the woman but as Love itself. A central claim of the essay is that Patmore’s imagination preserved childhood as a living companion to adult intellect and sorrow. Meynell links this to the great romantic traditions of love and nature, which she traces to the childhood experiences of Dante and Henry Vaughan. Patmore’s poetry, in her view, keeps the mystery, innocence, terror, and sweetness of childhood within mature passion and religious thought. The essay closes by presenting Patmore’s mind as a disciplined but richly overgrown garden: governed by ancient law, yet alive with liberty, abundance, and inspiration. Meynell stresses his reverence for poetry as an incarnate art in which metre, diction, pause, rhyme, and phrase are essential, not ornamental. Against Matthew Arnold’s idea of poetry as consolation, she asserts Patmore’s graver belief in poetry’s dignity, authority, and spiritual power. For Meynell, England should value Patmore as one of the poets by whom the nation itself is to be valued.

By Alice Meynell · First published 1922 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Biographical Essay, Poetry Criticism · 4,177 words

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To prophesy that the odes of Coventry Patmore shall be confessed, a hundred years hence, high classic poetry, is assuredly to promise the critics of a hundred years hence high classic quality in their judgement. It is to look for a definite intelligence and for an explicit code of literary law, inasmuch as a mind trained in the less obvious measures and restraints both of thought and of verse is needed to recognize the law of _The Unknown Eros_. It is to look, not only for such precision, but for its rare companions-liberty, flight, height, courage, a sense of space and a sense of closeness, readiness for spiritual experience, and all the gravity, all the resolution, of the lonely reader of a lonely poet. Whatever criticism may learn in time to come, _The Unknown Eros_ will hardly then have many readers, and will no doubt still keep the accidental loneliness that surrounds it now by reason of the indifference of the majority; but its essential loneliness is its own quality, conferred by no world's neglect; not an effect of conspicuousness or difference; not a mere contrast, for it is relative to nothing.

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biography · literary criticism · Victorian literature · English poetry · poet biography · nineteenth century · Catholic thought · aesthetic criticism · spirituality · poetic theory · religious poetry · literary portrait

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