SOURCE: “Robert Bridges and the Free Verse Rebellion,” in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, September 1971, pp. 19-32.

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.

It is not generally recognized that Robert Bridges was (in his own way) involved in the free verse rebellion of the 1910s and 1920s. Although he was seventy years old in 1914 when one of the most important volumes of the new movement, Des Imagistes, appeared, he was still keenly aware of what was going on among the younger poets of his time, and like them, he had become dissatisfied with conventional...