Coventry Patmore (1905) (e-book) (used book) | Edmund Gosse | bookbook.eu

Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1905. Excerpt: ... Chapter II LIFE IN LONDON (i846-1862) THE excitement caused by the publication of his early poems had no sooner subsided than Patmore began to regard them in an almost contemptuous light of common sense. Escaping from the hot-house air in which he had been educated, brought face to face with the facts of life and forced to look at literature from a healthy standpoint, his earliest discovery was of the weakness of his own overpraised and childish verses. He told Sutton, in the spring of 1847, that he was abashed at the thought of his foolish haste in publishing before his mind was matured, and added that, when all his friends were praising " The River" and "Lilian," and falling into ecstasies over "The Woodman's Daughter," he himself "was conscious from the first of the defective character of the book." There can be no question that the admirable judgment of Tennyson, so happily secured in exchange for M the sultry complaisance of the old Cockney circle, had much to do with this healthier condition of his spirit. Patmore was prevented at this time by a consciousness of failure from recurring to the practice of verse. He was greatly occupied with other interests, literary, moral and material, and he considered that he "wanted the grand essential leisure for writing poetry." In saying this he was, no doubt, repeating a formula of Tennyson's, who was in the habit of justifying the aimless, dreamy existence which he himself led, by asserting, --and perhaps with truth, --that a sauntering life of leisure was the only one in which a poet could do justice to his imagination. Patmore was now thrilled and subdued by the genius of Emerson, which was then at the height of its splendour, having quite recently been revealed to a few first English admirers. In his haste t...