BRIDGES, ROBERT (1844 )

This article appears in Volume V04, Page 533 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: BOS-BRI

BRIDGES, ROBERT (1844 ) , English poet, born on the 23rd of October 1844, was educated at Eton and at Corpus Christi College,

Oxford

, and studied

medicine

MEDICINE

in London at St Bartholomew's

hospital

. He was afterwards assistant physician at the Children's

hospital

Great

GREAT

Ormond Street, and physician at the

Great

GREAT

Northern hospital, retiring in 1882. Two years later he married Mary, daughter of Alfred Waterhouse, R.A. As a poet Robert Bridges stands rather apart from the current of modern English verse, but his

work

WORK

has had great influence in a select circle, by its restraint, purity, precision, and delicacy yet strength of expression; and it embodies a distinct theory of prosody. His

chief

CHIEF (from Fr. chef, head, Lat. caput)

critical

CRITICAL (in alphabetical order of authors)

works are Milton's Prosody (1893), a volume made up of two earlier essays (1887 and 1889), and John Keats, a

Critical

CRITICAL (in alphabetical order of authors)

Essay (1895). He maintained that English prosody depended on the number of " stresses" in a line, not on the number of syllables, and that poetry should follow the rules of natural speech. His, poetry was privately printed in the first instance, and was slow in making its way beyond a comparatively small circle of his admirers. His best

work

WORK

is to be found in his Shorter Poems (189o), and a complete edition of his Poetical Works (6 vols.) was published in 1898-1905. His

chief

CHIEF (from Fr. chef, head, Lat. caput)

volumes are Prometheus (

Oxford

, 1883, privately printed), a " mask in the Greek Manner "; Eros and Psyche (1885), a version of

Apuleius

APULEIUS, LUCIUS

; The Growth of Love, a

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of sixty-nine sonnets printed for private circulation in 1876 and 1889; Shorter Poems (189o); Nero (1885), a historical tragedy, the second part of which appeared in 1894; Achilles in Scyros (189o), a drama; Palicio (189o), a romantic drama in the Elizabethan manner; The Return of Ulysses (189o), a drama in,five acts; The Christian Captives (189o), a tragedy on the same subject as Calderon's El Principe Constante; The Humours of the Court (1893), a comedy founded on the same dramatist's El secreto 4 votes and on Lope de Vega's El Perro del hortelano; The Feast of Bacchus (1889), partly translated from the Heauton-Timoroumenos of Terence; Hymns from the Yattendon Hymnal (Oxford, 1899); and Demeter, a Mask (Oxford, 1905).

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