He was an English poet and critic best known for "The Angel in the House", his narrative poem about an ideal happy marriage. The eldest son of author Peter George Patmore, Coventry was born at Woodford in Essex. He was privately educated. He was also his father's intimate and constant companion and inherited from him his early literary enthusiasm. It was Coventry's ambition to become an artist. He showed much promise, earning the silver palette of the Society of Arts in 1838. In the following year he was sent to school in France for six months, where he began to write poetry. After returning, his father planned to publish some of these youthful poems. Due to his literary interests, he moved towards Alfred Lord Tennyson; and in 1844 he published a small volume of Poems, which was original but uneven. 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. He then got job as an assistant librarian in the British Museum, a post he occupied for nineteen years, devoting his spare time to poetry. At the Museum he was instrumental in 1852 in starting the Volunteer movement. He wrote an important letter to The Times upon the subject, and stirred up much martial enthusiasm among his colleagues. 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.
He was an English poet and critic best known for "The Angel in the House", his narrative poem about an ideal happy marriage. The eldest son of author Peter George Patmore, Coventry was born at Woodford in Essex. He was privately educated. He was also his father's intimate and constant companion and inherited from him his early literary enthusiasm. It was Coventry's ambition to become an artist. He showed much promise, earning the silver palette of the Society of Arts in 1838. In the following year he was sent to school in France for six months, where he began to write poetry. After returning, his father planned to publish some of these youthful poems. Due to his literary interests, he moved towards Alfred Lord Tennyson; and in 1844 he published a small volume of Poems, which was original but uneven. 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. He then got job as an assistant librarian in the British Museum, a post he occupied for nineteen years, devoting his spare time to poetry. At the Museum he was instrumental in 1852 in starting the Volunteer movement. He wrote an important letter to The Times upon the subject, and stirred up much martial enthusiasm among his colleagues. 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.
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