Coventry Patmore
Coventry Patmore is remembered, when he is remembered at all, as the Victorian who versified the happy marriage. The Unknown Eros shows how little that description covers. Its odes, written in an irregular, freely rhymed verse of the poet’s own devising, follow human love to the point where it begins to point beyond itself. A widower speaks in 'The Toys' and 'The Azalea'; a lover waits out the days in 'The Day After To-morrow'; the soul, as Psyche, answers her divine suitor in the great dialogues of the second book, where marriage, virginity, and pain are all treated as ways into the same mystery. Our Lady is honoured at length in 'The Child’s Purchase.' Running through the whole is Patmore’s severe and unfashionable verdict on an England he believed was spending its inheritance.This is the third edition of 1890, in which Patmore added every other poem he had written in the same metre, Amelia among them, to the odes of 1877. Neglected at its first appearance, the book has since been judged by many critics to be his finest work.
