British Poet Robert Bridges 1844 - 1930

Robert Seymour Bridges, OM, (23 October 1844 – 21 April 1930) was a British poet, and poet laureate from 1913 to 1930.

Bridges was born in Walmer, Kent, in the UK, and educated at Eton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He went on to study medicine in London at St Bartholomew's Hospital, intending to practise until the age of forty and then retire to write poetry.

He practised as a casualty physician at his teaching hospital (where he made a series of highly critical remarks about the Victorian medical establishment) and subsequently as a full physician to the Great (later Royal) Northern Hospital. He was also a physician to the Hospital for Sick Children.

Lung disease forced him to retire in 1882, and from that point on he devoted himself to writing and literary research. However, Bridges' literary work started long before his retirement, his first collection of poems having been published in 1873. In 1884 he married Monica Waterhouse, daughter of Alfred Waterhouse R.A., and spent the rest of his life in rural seclusion, first at Yattendon, Berkshire, then at Boars Hill, Oxford, where he died.

He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1900. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1913, the only medical graduate to have held the office.

He was the father of poet Elizabeth Daryush.

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.

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 meter 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 received 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.

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. At Corpus Christi College, 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.

One of Abercrombie's early projects during this period was to advise Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, 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 has also contributed to phonetics

Hymnody

Bridges made an important contribution to hymnody with the publication in 1899 of his Yattendon Hymnal, which he created specifically for musical reasons. This collection of hymns, although not a financial success, became a bridge between the Victorian hymnody of the last half of the 19th century and the modern hymnody of the early 20th century.

Bridges translated historic hymns, and many of these were included in Songs of Syon (1904) and the later English Hymnal (1906). Several of Bridges' translations are still in use today:

• Ah, Holy Jesus (Johann Heermann, 1630)
• All My Hope on God Is Founded (Joachim Neander, c. 1680)
• Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring (Martin Jahn, 1661)
• O Gladsome Light (Phos Hilaron)
• O Sacred Head, sore wounded (Paulus Gerhardt, 1656)
• O Splendour of God's Glory Bright (Ambrose,4th cent.)
• When morning gilds the skies (stanza 3; Katholisches Gesangbuch, 1744)

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)