SOURCE: Grafe, Adrian. “‘Telling Secrets’: Remarks on Coventry Patmore.” Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, no. 52 (October 2000): 99-119.

In the following essay, Grafe considers Patmore's connections to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Alice Meynell and evaluates Patmore's place within the context of nineteenth-century British verse.

By the by how can you speak of Patmore as you do? I read his Unknown Eros well before leaving Oxford. He shews a mastery of phrase, of the rhetoric of verse, which belongs to the tradition of Shakespeare and Milton and in which you could not find him a living equal nor perhaps a dead one either after them.¹

So Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to Robert Bridges in 1879, four years before the former met Coventry Patmore (1823-1896), the most celebrated Catholic writer of the day. They first met at Stonyhurst School in July 1883, where Hopkins's Rector, with knowing or unknowing understanding of Hopkins's interests, put...