Cloth binding. Black lettering with gilt title on front cover.

The Angel in the House is a narrative poem by Coventry Patmore, first published in 1854 and expanded until 1862. Although largely ignored upon publication, it became enormously popular in the United States during the later 19th century and then in Britain, and its influence continued well into the twentieth century as it became part of many English Literature courses once adopted by W. W. Norton & Company into The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The poem was an idealized account of Patmore’s courtship of his first wife, Emily Augusta Andrews (1824–1862), whom he married in 1847 and believed to be the perfect woman. According to Carol Christ, it is not a very good poem, “yet it is culturally significant, not only for its definition of the sexual ideal, but also for the clarity with which it represents the male concerns that motivate fascination with that ideal.”

Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore (23 July 1823 – 26 November 1896) was an English poet and critic best known for The Angel in the House, his narrative poem about the Victorian ideal of a happy marriage.

As a young man, Patmore found employment in the British Museum. Upon the publication of his first book of poems in 1844, he became acquainted with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. After the death of his first wife, the grief of loss became in great measure his later theme. Patmore is today one of the least-known but best-regarded Victorian poets.

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. “I have written little”, it runs; “but it is all my best; I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared time or labour to make my words true. I have respected posterity; and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me.” 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.^[2] Spirituality informs his inspiration; the poetry is glowing and alive. 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. His somewhat reactionary political opinions, which also find expression in his odes, find less praise today although they can certainly be said to reflect, as do his essays, a serious and very active mind. Patmore is today one of the least-known but best-regarded Victorian poets.

His son Henry John Patmore (1860–83) also became a poet.