Robert Bridges

Robert Bridges

Robert Seymour Bridges was Britain's poet laureate from 1913 to 1930. A doctor by training, he achieved literary fame only late in life. His poems reflect a deep Christian faith, and he is the author of many well-known hymns. It was through Bridges’ efforts that Gerard Manley Hopkins achieved posthumous fame.

Literary work:

As a poet Bridges stands rather apart from the current of modern English verse, but his work has had great influence in a select circle, by its restraint, purity, precision and delicacy yet strength of expression. It embodies a distinct theory of prosody. Bridges' faith underpinned much of his work.

In the book Milton's Prosody, he took an empirical approach to examining Milton's use of blank verse, and developed the controversial theory that Milton's practice was essentially syllabic. He considered free verse to be too limiting, and explained his position in the essay "Humdrum and Harum-Scarum". His own efforts to "free" verse resulted in the poems he called "Neo-Miltonic Syllabics", which were collected in New Verse (1925). The metre of these poems was based on syllables rather than accents, and he used the principle again in the long philosophical poem The Testament of Beauty (1929), for which he was appointed to the Order of Merit. His best-known poems, however, are to be found in the two earlier volumes of Shorter Poems (1890, 1894). He also wrote verse plays, with limited success, and literary criticism, including a study of the work of John Keats.

Bridges' poetry was privately printed in the first instance, and was slow in making its way beyond a comparatively small circle of his admirers. His best work is to be found in his Shorter Poems (1890), and a complete edition (to date) of his Poetical Works (6 vols.) was published in 1898-1905.

Despite being made poet laureate in 1913, Bridges was never a very well-known poet and only achieved his great popularity shortly before his death with The Testament of Beauty. However, his verse evoked response in many great British composers of the time. Among those to set his poems to music were Hubert Parry, Gustav Holst and later Gerald Finzi.

During the First World War, Bridges joined the group of writers assembled by Charles Masterman as part of Britain's War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House.

At Oxford, Bridges became friends with Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is now considered a superior poet but who owes his present fame to Bridges' efforts in arranging the posthumous publication (1918) of his verse.

Bridges received advice from the young phonetician David Abercrombie on the reformed spelling system he was devising for the publication of his collected essays (later published in seven volumes by Oxford University Press, with the help of the distinguished typographer Stanley Morison, who designed the new letters). Thus Robert Bridges contributed to phonetics and he was also a founder member of the Society for Pure English.

Major works:

Dates given are of first publication and significant revisions.

Poetry collections:

  • The Growth of Love (1876; 1889; 1898), a sequence of (24; 79; 69) sonnets
  • Prometheus the Firegiver: A Mask in the Greek Manner (1883)
  • Eros and Psyche: A Narrative Poem in Twelve Measures (1885; 1894), a story from the Latin of Apuleius
  • Shorter Poems, Books I–IV (1890)
  • Shorter Poems, Books I–V (1894)
  • New Poems (1899)
  • Demeter: A Mask (1905), performed 1904
  • Ibant Obscuri: An Experiment in the Classical Hexameter (1916), with reprint of summary of Stone's Prosody, accompanied by 'later observations & modifications'
  • October and Other Poems (1920)
  • The Tapestry: Poems (1925), in neo-Miltonic syllabics
  • New Verse (1926), includes verse of The Tapestry
  • The Testament of Beauty (1929)

Verse drama:

  • Nero (1885), an historical tragedy; called The First Part of Nero subsequent to the publication of Nero: Part II
  • The Feast of Bacchus (1889); partly translated from the Heauton-Timoroumenos of Terence
  • Achilles in Scyros (1890), a drama in a mixed manner
  • Palicio (1890), a romantic drama in five acts in the Elizabethan manner
  • The Return of Ulysses (1890), a drama in five acts in a mixed manner
  • The Christian Captives (1890), a tragedy in five acts in a mixed manner; on the same subject as Calderón's El Principe Constante
  • The Humours of the Court (1893), a comedy in three acts; founded on Calderón's El secreto á voces and on Lope de Vega's El Perro del hortelano
  • Nero, Part II (1894)

Prose:

  • Milton's Prosody, With a Chapter on Accentual Verse (1893; 1901; 1921), based on essays published in 1887 and 1889
  • Keats (1895)
  • Hymns from the Yattendon Hymnal (1899)
  • The Spirit of Man (1916)
  • Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918), edited with notes by R.B.
  • The Necessity of Poetry (1918)
  • Collected Essays, Papers, Etc. (1927–36)