ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relation of Coventry Patmore, never admitted by him, and to what four years later was to be called Pre-Raphaelitism was acutely perceived in 1844 by Bulwer Lytton. Patmore's early verse had been received in some quarters with abuse. Thus a reviewer in Blackwood, shrewd enough to suspect that the younger generation of poets was drawing on Keats and Shelley, had cried out on the appearance of Patmore's volume, this is the life into which the slime of the Keateses and Shelleys of former times has fecundated. But Bulwer Lytton, in a queerly phrased, oddly punctuated, intelligently discriminating letter to the young poet, put his finger on almost every virtue and defect, deprecating the intrusion of prose matter, warning him against excessive particularity: It seems to me that, in common with Tennyson, you cultivate details to the injury of the broad whole.
