Love Thinking

Abstract

This essay places Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House in the context of Victorian explorations of the act of thinking about a beloved other. It centers on two short "Preludes" from the poem--"The Kiss" and "Love Thinking"--which raise questions about the relationship of love to knowledge. Reading Patmore's poem in this way makes it possible to recognize "The Kiss" as the crucial source for a much more serious poem about thinking, kissing, and sleeping: George Meredith's Modern Love. Through its relation to Meredith's poem and to other texts, as well as to Patmore's theory of poetic meter, "The Kiss" opens onto serious concerns about whether thinking about the one you love is constitutive of--or destructive to--intimacy.

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