Robert Bridges 1844-1930
English poet, dramatist, and critic.
Having initially trained and worked as a physician, Bridges ultimately became prominent in English letters during the late Victorian and early twentieth century as a writer of lyrical verse. The English poet A. E. Housman described the lyrics in Bridges's famous collection, The Shorter Poems (1890-94), as universally excellent. While Bridges experimented with prosody and free verse, he is generally regarded as a classicist. His investigation into eighteenth-century classical forms culminated in The Testament of Beauty (1929), a long philosophical poem considered by many to be his masterpiece. Bridges served as England's poet laureate from 1913 until his death in 1930.
Bridges was born into a family of small landowners in Walmer, Kent. This port town and its famous resident, the Duke of Wellington, would be featured in some of the poet's lyrics. Bridges received his education at Eton and then at Oxford, where he befriended the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins's experiments with an unusual type of meter he called “sprung rhythm” mirrored Bridges's own, somewhat more conservative attempts at “stress prosody,” which he used in such well-known poems as “On a Dead Child” and “London Snow.”
Bridges did not embark on his poetic career immediately. His first impulse was to train as a cleric in the Church of England, but in 1869 he opted instead to enroll in medical school. After graduation in 1874, Bridges became a physician at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London and later worked at the Hospital for Sick Children. Bridges retired from medicine in 1881 after becoming seriously ill with pneumonia. He moved with his mother to Yattendon, Berkshire, where he met and married Monica Waterhouse. While in Yattendon, from 1882 to 1904, Bridges wrote some of his most popular short lyrics as well as his narrative poem, Eros and Psyche (1885). In 1907 he moved back to Oxford with his family and into Boar's Hill—a house that he had designed himself. In 1914 when England entered World War I, Bridges felt it was his duty as newly appointed poet laureate to contribute to the war effort through his writing. His war poems were collected in October and Other Poems, with Occasional Verses on the War (1920). After his daughter Margaret died from a prolonged illness in 1926, Bridges tried to cope with his grief by embarking on a long philosophical work. The resulting Testament of Beauty was to be his final poetic work before his death in 1930.
Although Bridges wrote several long poems, he is perhaps best known for his shorter works. His sonnet sequence, The Growth of Love (1876), reveals Bridges's facility for the Italian and English sonnet forms and, indeed, are clearly influenced by the sonnets of Shakespeare and John Milton. The publication of The Shorter Poems (1890-94), selected from the best of Bridges's lyric poems up to that date, marks the summit of his growing fame as a poet. In addition to those written in irregularly stressed syllables, Bridges's lyrics also include many written in more conventional metric forms. The subjects of these short poems include the nostalgia of childhood, elegies on death, reflections on love, meditations on religious issues, and—what was of particular interest to Bridges—the nature of beauty and the beauty of the natural world. Bridges's collection of war poems, October and Other Poems, reflects the prolonged and unexpected course of World War I as well as the poet's concerns about his son, Edward, who was stationed at the western front. Accordingly, the earlier war poems are stirringly patriotic, while the later poems depict the appalling conditions of trench warfare. Bridges's New Verse (1925) offers examples of his interest in classical Greek and Latin poetry; several of the poems in this collection are experiments in what he described as classical, “neo-Miltonic syllabics.” Bridges's final work of poetry, The Testament of Beauty, consists of over 4,000 lines and is divided into four books. It has been described by critic Donald E. Stanford as a “spiritual autobiography depicting the development of a poet's sense of beauty, his response to beauty wherever he finds it.”
Bridges's poetry received little notice before 1912 when a collection of his poetry was published by Oxford University Press and garnered praise from critics and public alike. Critics of the mid-twentieth century, however, did not hold him in high regard. Some described him as a minor poet; others criticized his conservative, Victorian values. The subject matter of Bridges's poetry has also been condemned as trivial or empty; scholars have argued that it focuses on the prettiness of nature and the details of prosody rather than delving into more important topics. More recently, critics have commended Bridges for his experimentation with verse form and have praised him for his skill as a poetic technician. Most critics are united in assessing Bridges's final poem, The Testament of Beauty, as a masterpiece of both form and content.