Bridges, Robert Seymour 1844-1930
English poet and critic

Born in Walmer, Kent, he was educated at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, then studied medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital and practised until 1881. At university he met Gerard Manley Hopkins and arranged for the posthumous publication of his poems in 1918. Bridges's first collection, Poems, appeared in 1873, and was followed by The Growth of Love (1876), a sequence of sonnets. He then wrote two long poems, Prometheus the Firegiver (1883) and Eros and Psyche (1885), but for the next decade he concentrated on eight plays, only one of which was performed in his lifetime. He contributed to criticism with studies of Milton (1893) and Keats (1895) and wrote poems set to music by Hubert Parry, as well as A Practical Discourse on Hymn Singing (1901). In 1912 he published his Collected Poems and in 1913 was appointed Poet Laureate, and produced The Spirit of Man (1916). After World War I, he published October and Other Poems (1920) and the long poem The Testament of Beauty (1929).

Bibliography: L P Smith, Robert Bridges: recollections (1931)