SOURCE: Fleming, W. K. “Coventry Patmore.” Life and Letters 4, no. 20 (January 1930): 27-40.

In the following essay, Fleming reflects on Patmore's fleeting popularity as a poet as well as his limited appeal to readers and critics.

He who would study Patmore, the somewhat neglected and, it may be conjectured, always to be neglected prophet-poet of the later Victorian age, must be prepared to undertake a long journey, mental and spiritual, and, emphatically, to go all lengths. It is, indeed, necessary, in order to make any sort of adequate study of a poet's work, and in this case of his beautiful ‘poet's prose’ as well as his verse, to be in some sympathy or affinity with his mind and message, as well as susceptible to the rarer thrills, ‘the authentic airs of Paradise’, with which great poetry is for ever apt to surprise us. This is what Patmore himself described...