Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore (23 July 1823 – 26 November 1896) was an English poet[1] and literary critic.

He is best known for his book of poetry The Angel in the House, a narrative poem about the Victorian ideal of a happy marriage.

In 1846, with help from Richard Monckton Milnes, Coventry Patmore was appointed as the printed book supernumary assistant at the British Museum.

Furthermore, the publication of Poems enabled him to network with other literary figures, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

In 1877 Patmore published The Unknown Eros,[12] which some commentators believe contains his finest poetic work,[13] and in 1878 Amelia, his own favourite among his poems, together with an essay on English Metrical Law.

This departure into criticism continued in 1879 with a volume of papers entitled Principle in Art, and again in 1893 with Religio Poetae.

Patmore's second wife Marianne died in 1880, and in 1881 he married Harriet Robson[2] from Bletchingley in Surrey (born 1840), his children's governess.

A collected edition of Patmore's poems appeared in two volumes in 1886, with a characteristic preface which might serve as the author's epitaph.

The sincerity which underlies this statement, combined with a certain lack of humour which peers through its naïveté, points to two of the principal characteristics of Patmore's earlier poetry; characteristics which came to be almost unconsciously merged and harmonized as his style and his intention drew together into unity.As happy love had been his earlier, the grief of loss became, in great measure, his later theme; touching and sublime thoughts upon love, death, and immortality are conveyed through strikingly poetic imagery and unusual form in the odes of The Unknown Eros, his best work.

The collection is full not only of passages but entire poems in which exalted thought is expressed in poetry of the richest and most dignified melody.

The magnificent piece in praise of winter, the solemn and beautiful cadences of "Departure", and the homely but elevated pathos of "The Toys", are in their manner unsurpassed in English poetry.