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 rules of phonetic spelling, for his Collected Essays (1927-1936), which was printed in a phonetic typeface designed by Bridges and Stanley Morison. (All quotations below taken from this collection have been put into conventional spelling and type.) Bridges's wife, Monica, completed the collected edition after the poet's death in 1930. Of Bridges's literary criticism the American critic and poet Yvor Winters has written, "Any civilized reader will find the critical essays of Bridges to be profitable reading."

His wide-ranging interests also included medicine, secular music, church music and hymns, the pictorial arts, prosody, calligraphy, the correct pronunciation of Greek and Latin, the drama (especially verse drama, including that...