author
Coventry Patmore
1823–1896
A Victorian poet and critic remembered both for the hugely influential domestic poem The Angel in the House and for later, more intense religious and love poetry. His work helped shape debates about marriage, femininity, and devotion long after the 19th century.
5 Audiobooks
The Angel in the House
by Coventry Patmore
The Victories of Love, and Other Poems
by Coventry Patmore
The Unknown Eros
by Coventry Patmore
Principle in Art, Etc.
by Coventry Patmore
The poetry of pathos & delight : from the works of Coventry Patmore
by Coventry Patmore
About the author
Born in Woodford, Essex, on July 23, 1823, Coventry Patmore grew into one of the notable English poets of the Victorian age. He also worked at the British Museum and moved in literary circles connected with the Pre-Raphaelites, giving him a place not just in poetry but in the wider artistic world of his time.
Patmore is best known for The Angel in the House, a sequence of poems inspired in part by his first marriage and famous for expressing the Victorian ideal of domestic womanhood. The phrase became far more famous than the poem itself, and it has remained part of cultural conversation because later writers and critics pushed back against the ideal it represented.
His reputation also rests on later work, especially The Unknown Eros, where his poetry became more inward, mystical, and ambitious. Alongside verse, he wrote criticism and essays, and today he is remembered as a poet whose writing can open a window onto Victorian ideas about love, faith, and family, even when modern readers strongly disagree with them.