SOURCE: “The Traditionalist Poet,” in his In the Classic Mode: The Achievement of Robert Bridges, Associated University Presses, 1978, pp. 19-79.

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.

Bridges's collection of Shorter Poems (1890)¹ established his reputation as one of the great lyric poets in English. Of this book A. E. Housman 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.² In this first collection of the Shorter Poems there were a few experiments in accentual meters, and later Bridges wrote poems in classical prosody and in neo-Miltonic syllabics. These experiments and Bridges's explanations of them are important contributions to the theory and...