SOURCE: Evans, Ifor. “Coventry Patmore and Allied Poets: Coventry Patmore, Francis Thompson, Alice Meynell.” In English Poetry in the Later Nineteenth Century, pp. 154-73. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1966.

In the following excerpt, which was initially published in 1933, Evans offers a thematic and stylistic analysis of Patmore's verse.

The Pre-Raphaelites developed and exploited a fresh element in the later phases of English romanticism, but the boundaries of their poetical world excluded many themes. In the main, their aestheticism had no place for mystical or religious experience; Rossetti's contacts with Catholic ritual were wayward and unconvincing; Swinburne's efforts towards philosophical poetry and political poetry as in Songs before Sunrise were highly subjective and awkwardly self-conscious. William Morris had kept all such themes away from his verse; his politics were left to his prose, and religion was excluded both from prose and verse. Contemporary with the Pre-Raphaelites there existed more than...