SD2069. Coventry Patmore to William Allingham

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 258 (in part).

British Museum,

April 28, ’57.

My Dear Allingham,

I shall be very glad to see your hand again in poetry. …

The article in the National on “Aurora Leigh” is not mine. I should never have called it “a great poem” in any other than a material sense. It reminds me of an ill-conditioned child jumping at the stars and stamping on the flowers.

“Standing on the head makes not

Either for ease or dignity,”

some one says, and the operation becomes still more undignified when the performer wears flounces.

Text: Basil Champneys, Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore (London, 1900), II, 185–186.

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