One of the dominant figures of late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century British poetry, poet laureate of England from 1913 to 1930, Robert Bridges became best known in his day and is known in ours as a master of lyric verse and as author of the...

One of the dominant figures of late Victorian and early twentieth-century British poetry, poet laureate of England from 1913 to 1930, Robert Bridges became best known in his day and is known in ours as a master of lyric verse and as author of the...

Robert Seymour Bridges is known primarily as a lyric poet and as the author of the long philosophical poem The Testament of Beauty (1929). His major concern, poetry, dominates his essays, thirty of which he began editing in 1927, according to his own...

In the following essay, De Selincourt describes the central theme in Bridges's poetry as the beauty of nature and compares Bridges's treatment of this theme with that of other poets such as Keats, Browning, and Swinburne.

In the following excerpt, Stanford examines Bridges's shorter poems, sonnets, and philosophical poems, and concludes that these works display a complexity and attention to poetic craft that is missing in the works of other poets of his era.

In the following essay, Stanford suggests that while Bridges was actively interested in the free verse movement of much younger poets such as Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound, the older poet nevertheless held to the traditional belief that the subjects of poems should be weighty matters rather than “trivial” items, such as a wheelbarrow, which interested the younger poets.