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Robert Bridges: WORK-IN-PROCESS

Life and work

Youth (1844-1868)

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Bridges was born in Walmer, Kent, and educated at Eton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he was a distinguished oarsman on the boat crew. He graduated in 1867, after which he made a tour of Egypt and Jerusalem with his friend Lionel Muirhead.

Physician (1869-1881)

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Bridges enrolled as a medical student at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London in 1869, intending to practice 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. In June of 1881 he contracted pneumonia, which required him to move temporarily to the milder climate of Italy; he did not fully recover and return to England until May of the next year. At this point he retired from his career as a physician; shortly thereafter he moved with his mother to the secluded village of Yattendon, Berkshire. Although he wrote poetry throughout this period (virtually his earliest extant verse dates from 1869), Bridges only slowly accumulated a body of work with which he himself was satified: he later attempted to suppress both his first volume of poetry (1873) and the first edition of his sonnet sequence The Growth of Love (1876); his next 2 volumes of poetry (1879 and 1880) were published anonymously. Many of these poems, especially from the 1873 volume, were either revised or eliminated completely from his later collections.

Poet (1882-1899)

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After his retirement, convalescence, and retreat to Yattendon, Bridges experienced a period of great productivity. During the 1880s, he produced a second much-expanded edition of The Growth of Love, the long poem Eros and Psyche, and 8 of his 10 dramas and masques. In 1884 he married Monica Waterhouse, daughter of Alfred Waterhouse R.A. who owned the estate to which Bridges had recently moved. The Bridges had 3 children: Elizabeth (who became a poet in her own right) in 1887, Margeret in 1889, and Edward in 1892. He closed the decade with the publication of Shorter Poems, Books I - IV, which contained all that he wished to preserve of his earlier verse, along with new verse in a similar vein. It was by this single work that Bridges the poet was known for most of the rest of his life. "Of this book A. E. Houseman said that no volume of English verse had ever attained such perfection and anthologists of the future would have immense difficulty in making a selection."

In the 1890s he added a fifth book to the Shorter Poems, wrote a sequel to his verse drama Nero, and published a further volume of short poems, New Poems. Meanwhile he had published the first edition of his detailed study of John Milton's methods of versification, and a literary criticism of John Keats. The period was capped off by an edition of his complete Poetical Works in 6 volumes published from 1898-1905.

Prosodist, essayist, and laureate (1900-1925)

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"During the quarter century in which he wrote little of poetic importance, 1900-1925, Bridges was occupied with experiements in classical prosody, studies of Milton's versification, the preparation of essays and anthologies, and investigations for the Society for Pure English."

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 was appointed Poet Laureate in 1913, the only medical graduate to have held the office.

Late reflorescence (1926-1930)

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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.

Beginning in 1925 or 1926 he began work on a long philosophical poem, utilizing neo-Miltonic syllabics in a 12-syllable line, which was to become The Testament of Beauty. As his writing progressed, Bridges became increasingly infirm and acutely aware of the possibility that he may not live to complete it; indeed the last of the 4 books was spirited through the press more quickly than the previous 3 had been. Nevertheless the complete work was published on 24 October 1929 (the day after Bridges' 85th birthday), and was not only a critical success, but also Bridges' first and only popular work, requiring 8 reprints during 1929 and 1930 alone. By 1946, nearly 68,000 copies had been sold in England and the US. For this work, Bridges received the Order of Merit.

Bridges died in 1930 at his home.

Critical reception

still just fragments; music section maybe should be moved

As a poet Bridges stood rather apart from the current of modern English verse: "Bridges was as little the contemporary of Browning and Swinburne in 1873 as he was of T. S. Eliot and Carl Sandburg in 1930."

Bridges was a competent singer and composer, and for a time was choir director at Yattendon, so it is no suprise that, even though he was not well-known, his verse was noticed by, and appealed to, contemporary composers. He collaborated directly with Hubert Parry (a friend since their school-days at Eton) and Charles Stanford, and his verse was also set to music by Gustav Holst, Gerald Finzi, and others.

Bridges and Hopkins

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At Corpus Christi College, Bridges became friends with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Though they discussed their mutual interest in the arts, Hopkins apparently did not discover that Bridges wrote poetry until he happened to read a review of Bridges' first book 8 years later. Ironically, while Hopkins might be unknown today had it not been for Bridges' efforts to preserve and publish his poetry, Hopkins' fame now is considerably greater, and Bridges is now known to many only in his capacity as Hopkins' first editor.

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Gerard Manley Hopkins died in 1889, and Bridges intended to produce an edition of his poety; however, this did not materialize until 1918. Why did Bridges wait nearly 30 years to publish Hopkins' work? Several reasons have been adduced:

1. The reading public was "not ready" for Hopkins' work.
2. Bridges despaired of composing an adequate memoir of Hopkins, which at the time he considered a necessary introduction to the work; which may relate to...
3. Bridges' possible conflicted feelings of loyalty toward Hopkins, yet regret that he had died without fulfilling his promise as a writer; and remorse that Bridges had not done more for Hopkins both personally and literarily.
4. Bridges himself suggested that Hopkins' verse was not a good introduction to the accentual prosody they had both practiced -- Hopkins radically, Bridges moderately.

Any or all of these may have played a part, and Bridges has been criticized for withholding Hopkins' works from the public, a criticism he himself anticipated. But it must be remembered that Bridges took much more care to preserve Hopkins' work than did Hopkins himself; Bridges seems to have found both critics and publishers to be generally uninterested in Hopkins work; and in fact Bridges did include selections in 2 anthologies published in 1893 and 1916. Moreover if Bridges was indeed hesitant because of the unreadiness of the public, he seems to have been right: Hopkins' work did not win wide recognition until the 1930s.

Hymnody

Bridges made an important contribution to hymnody with the publication in 1894-99 of the Yattendon Hymnal, edited by his friend Harry Ellis Wooldridge and himself. Most of the tunes were selected from 17th- and 18th-century composers, with harmonizations provided by Wooldridge and Bridges' wife, Monica. This collection of hymns, although itself not a financial success, was admired both for its content and its typography, and influenced subsequent more popular collections.

Bridges provided new texts to over 40 of the 100 hymns, most of them translations, 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 (Paul Gerhardt, 1656)
• O Splendour of God's Glory Bright (Ambrose, 4th cent.)
• When morning gilds the skies (stanza 3; Katholisches Gesangbuch, 1744)

Typography

Much of Bridges' earlier poetry was at first privately printed, often by Henry Daniel, who Bridges met in 1880. Bridges himself took a great interest in typography; he not only exerted a strong influence on the design of his own books but, as an enthusiastic advocate of the Fell types, also had a pronounced effect on the practices of Daniel and the Oxford University Press.