Robert Bridges

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Robert Seymour Bridges, born on the 23rd of October 1844, spent the first four decades of his adult life doing something that might seem strange for a man history remembers as Britain's Poet Laureate: he practiced medicine. He worked as a casualty physician, then as a full physician at the Great Northern Central Hospital, and also attended patients at the Hospital for Sick Children. Poetry was never far from his mind, but it waited. He had made a plan at the start of his medical training: work until forty, then retire to write. Lung disease forced his hand early, in 1885, but the plan held.

  What kind of poet emerges from decades of clinical practice? What does a man trained in empirical observation do when he turns that eye on verse, on language, on the sounds of English itself? And how does someone who was, by his own era's reckoning, a poet of modest public reach end up as the person who introduced the world to Gerard Manley Hopkins? These are the questions that run through the story of Robert Bridges.

• 2. From Kent to the Wards

  ›

  Walmer, Kent, was where Bridges came into the world as the fourth son and eighth child of John Thomas Bridges, who died in 1853 when Robert was still young. His mother, Harriett Elizabeth, remarried the following year, wedding John Edward Nassau Molesworth, vicar of Rochdale, and the family relocated north. Bridges was, on his mother's side, a grandson of Sir Robert Affleck, the 4th Baronet.

  Eton College shaped his early formation, and then Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he left in 1867 with a second-class honours degree in Literae humaniores. He headed to London next, to St Bartholomew's Hospital, not abandoning literature but deferring it. At his teaching hospital he worked as a casualty physician, and records note he made a series of highly critical remarks about the Victorian medical establishment during that period. He moved on to the Great Northern Central Hospital as a full physician from 1876 until 1885, and served simultaneously at the Hospital for Sick Children. His election to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London came in 1900, fifteen years after he had left clinical practice. The fellowship arrived, in other words, as a kind of retrospective honor for a career already closed.

• 3. The Poet in Seclusion

  ›

  Even before lung disease ended his medical career, Bridges had published his first collection of poems, in 1873, more than a decade before his retirement. The illness that forced him out of medicine in 1885 simply removed the final obstacle between him and the life he had long intended.

  In 1884, Bridges married Mary Monica Waterhouse, the daughter of the architect Alfred Waterhouse. From that point, he withdrew from city life into rural seclusion. The couple lived first at the Manor House in Yattendon, Berkshire, and then from 1905 on the Boars Hill ridge above Oxford, where Bridges would remain for the rest of his life. Two of his children became notable in their own right: his daughter Elizabeth Daryush became a poet, and his son Edward Bridges became a cabinet secretary.

  His best-known verse appeared in two volumes of Shorter Poems, published in 1890 and 1894, and his complete Poetical Works ran to six volumes published across the years 1898 to 1905. His verse attracted composers of some distinction, among them Hubert Parry, Gustav Holst, and Gerald Finzi, who set his poems to music.

• 4. Prosody as Research

  ›

  Milton's Prosody, which Bridges published in 1889, set out a deliberately empirical case: that John Milton's practice in blank verse was essentially syllabic rather than accentual. This was a controversial argument, and Bridges built it from close textual scrutiny in the manner of a researcher cataloguing clinical observations.

  He considered free verse too limiting and explained his position in an essay he titled "Humdrum and Harum-Scarum". His own alternative, which he called "Neo-Miltonic Syllabics", counted syllables rather than stresses, and poems in that form were gathered in New Verse in 1925. The long philosophical poem The Testament of Beauty, published in 1929, applied the same metrical principle at full scale. That poem brought Bridges the Order of Merit in 1929, the same year it appeared, and it finally delivered the wide public readership that had eluded him for decades. His appointment as Poet Laureate in 1913 had made him the only medical graduate to hold the office, but the real popular recognition came only at the very end, with The Testament of Beauty.

• 5. The Hymnal Legacy

  ›

  The Yattendon Hymnal, which Bridges published in 1899 and created specifically for musical reasons, was not a commercial success, yet it carried lasting weight. It served as a bridge between the Victorian hymnody of the second half of the nineteenth century and the modern hymnody that followed in the early twentieth.

  Bridges both wrote original hymns and translated historic ones drawn from earlier centuries, several of which reached major collections including Songs of Syon in 1904 and the English Hymnal in 1906. The translations ranged widely in their source material: Johann Heermann's "Herzliebster Jesu" from 1630, Joachim Neander's "All my hope on God is founded" from around 1680, Paul Gerhardt's "O sacred head, sore wounded" from 1656, and a text attributed to Ambrose from the 4th century. Some of these versions remain in active liturgical use. His translation of "Jesu, joy of man's desiring", tracing back to Martin Jahn in 1661, is among the best known.

• 6. Hopkins and the Phonetic Project

  ›

  At Oxford, Bridges had befriended Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is now widely regarded as one of the major English poets of the Victorian era. Hopkins published almost nothing during his own lifetime, and it was Bridges who arranged for a posthumous edition of his verse, which appeared in 1918. Without that act of editorial stewardship, Hopkins's innovations in rhythm and imagery might have remained entirely unknown.

  Bridges also pursued a separate and unusual linguistic project: he developed his own phonetic alphabet for English, with help from the phonetician David Abercrombie. The letters were designed by the typographer Stanley Morison of the Monotype Corporation, and the Oxford University Press printed seven volumes of his Collected Essays, Papers, and so on in that alphabet. Bridges was also a founding member of the Society for Pure English, a body concerned with questions of language usage and standardization. The War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House, where Bridges served during the First World War as one of the writers assembled by Charles Masterman, represents yet another institutional attachment, one that placed him alongside other literary figures in the service of wartime government communication. He died on the 21st of April 1930, on the Boars Hill ridge where he had lived since 1905, and Three Friends, his memoirs of Digby Mackworth Dolben, Richard Watson Dixon, and Henry Bradley, appeared posthumously in 1932.