Coventry Patmore Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Benjamin F. Fisher

Critical Essay by Benjamin F. Fisher

SOURCE: Fisher, Benjamin F. “The Supernatural in Patmore's Poetry.” Victorian Poetry 34, no. 4 (winter 1996): 544-57.

In the following essay, Fisher examines Patmore's use of the supernatural in his poetry.

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Coventry Patmore, the Laureate of domesticity and married love, the realist poet, a purveyor of supernaturalism? The usual response would be “nonsense!” Careful reading, however, will discover ghosts, vampires, and hauntings—in many minds the stuff of Gothic or popular horror literature, “popular” in a pejorative sense—recurring in Patmore's poetry. Interestingly, in this context, in a chapter entitled “London Gothic,” in The London Nobody Knows, Geoffrey Fletcher emphasizes that Pre-Raphaelite paintings and “certain poems by Morris and Patmore and the illustrators of the sixties lead us into an enchanted world, possessing a curious half-melancholy power over the mind. This was one aspect, and the most important, of nineteenth-century romanticism.” Now a pertinent comment from Patmore himself. From Leghorn, on March...
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