Coventry Patmore's Corpus

Abstract

This article challenges the longstanding popular and critical consensus that Coventry Patmore is an “abstract,” “idealizing” or “immaterial” poet. On the contrary, Patmore vied with Swinburne as the most cosmopolitan of Victorian poets, being a radically conservative Hegelian and heterodox Catholic, in addition to producing some of the most technically experimental verse in the English vernacular. By reading his varied corpus, I demonstrate that Patmore thinks the body in a complex and dialectical manner, which nonetheless remains significantly distinct from what became known as “the fleshly school of poetry.” This argument rests on several related readings, all of which seek to correct the standard account of Patmore’s career. I firstly consider his aphoristic writings, which demonstrate Patmore’s parallel thinking of erotic desire and theological devotion that disconcerted several putatively more “embodied” contemporaries such as Hopkins. I then seek to restore Patmore to a broader European context, which includes Paul Claudel and G. W. F., of whose work Patmore proves one of the finest English interpreters. Finally, I read The Unknown Eros (1877), to suggest a dynamic and fluid relation with what is often erroneously taken to clinch his reputation as a prosodic idealist, “The Essay on Metrical Law.”