SOURCE: Praz, Mario. “The Epic of the Everyday: The Angel in the House by Coventry Patmore.” In The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, translated by Angus Davidson, pp. 413-43. London: Oxford University Press, 1956.

In the following essay, originally published in Italian in 1952, Praz explores the metaphysical elements of The Angel in the House.

He thinks of writing a poem to be the poem of the age.

—Letter from Alfred Fryer, referring to Coventry Patmore

The poetry of Coventry Patmore again occupies a place of honour in our present century, thanks to its ‘discovery’ by Paul Claudel and to the translation he made of a group of odes from The Unknown Eros in 1911.¹ In this work (published in 1877) Patmore showed how closely related he was to the English religious poets of the seventeenth century, to the ‘metaphysical’ tradition on one side (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan), and on the...