Patmore, COVENTRY KEARSEY DEIGHTON, poet, was born at Woodford, Essex, July 23, 1823, the son of P. G. Patmore, author of My Friends and Acquaintances. He published a volume of Poems in 1844, and three years later joined the staff of librarians in the British Museum, where he remained till 1868, when he purchased a small estate in Sussex. Soon after he settled at Hastings, where he built a large Catholic church. His second volume of poems, Tamerton Church-tower, &c. (1853), prepared the way for his greatest work, The Angel in the House, an elaborate, exquisite, and sincere poem of love from the domestic side, which has had a great popularity, but not beyond its deserts. It consists of four parts, all included under the general title for the first time in the edition of 1866: The Betrothal
(1854), The Espousals (1856), Faithful for Ever (1860), and The Victories of Love (1863). A carefully revised edition of this poem was issued in his collected poems (1878 and 1886), with an essay on English Metrical Law, and including The Unknown Eros, a mystical poem first published in 1877. The Rod, the Root, and the Flower (1895) contains religious poems. Patmore edited the anthology entitled The Children's Garland (1862), the Autobiography of Barry Cornwall (1877), and the poems of his son Henry (1884). Florilegium Amantis was a selection from his poems (ed. Garnett, 1888); another was Poems of Pathos and Delight (ed. Meynell, 1895). He died 26th Nov. 1896. See Life by Basil Champneys (2 vols. 1900).