ROBERT

See also:

• BRIDGES
• ROBERT BRIDGES (1844– )

BRIDGES (1844– )  , English poet, born on the 23rd of October 1844, was educated at Eton and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and studied medicine in London at St Bartholomew's hospital . He was afterwards assistant physician at the Children's hospital, Great Ormond Street, and physician at the 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 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 critical works are Milton's Prosody (1893), a volume made up of two earlier essays (1887 and 1889), and John Keats, a Critical 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 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 volumes are Prometheus (Oxford, 1883, privately printed), a " mask in the Greek Manner "; Eros and Psyche (1885), a version of Apuleius; The Growth of Love, a series 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) .