Robert Seymour Bridges, OM, (23 October 1844 – 21 April 1930) was an English poet, and poet laureate from 1913 to 1930.
Bridges was born in Walmer, Kent, and educated at Eton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He went on to study medicine in London at St Bartholomew's Hospital, and intended to practice until the age of forty and then retire to write poetry. He was afterwards assistant physician at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and physician at the Great Northern Hospital. Lung disease forced him to retire in 1882, and from that point on he devoted himself to writing and literary research.
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. The poet Elizabeth Daryush was his daughter.
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". He maintained that English prosody depended on the number of "stresses" in a line, not on the number of syllables, and that poetry should follow the rules of natural speech. 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 English composers of the time. Among those to set his poems to music were Hubert Parry, Gustav Holst, and later Gerald Finzi.[citation needed]
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 (1916) of his verse.
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 of his Poetical Works (6 vols.) was published in 1898-1905. His chief volumes are Prometheus (Oxford, 1883, privately printed), a "mask in the Greek Manner"; Eros and Psyche (1885), a version of the story from Apuleius; The Growth of Love, a series of sixty-nine sonnets printed for private circulation in 1876 and 1889; Shorter Poems (1890); Nero (1885), a historical tragedy, the second part of which appeared in 1894; Achilles in Scyros (1890), a drama; Palicio (1890), a romantic drama in the Elizabethan manner; The Return of Ulysses (1890), a drama in five acts; The Christian Captives (1890), a tragedy on the same subject as Calderon's El Principe Constante; The Humours of the Court (1893), a comedy founded on the same dramatist's El secreto á voces and on Lope de Vega's El Perro del hortelano; The Feast of Bacchus (1889), partly translated from the Heauton-Timoroumenos of Terence; Hymns from the Yattendon Hymnal (Oxford, 1899); and Demeter, a Mask (Oxford, 1905).
