Biography Essay

One of the dominant figures of late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century British poetry, poet laureate of England from 1913 to 1930, Robert Bridges became best known in his day and is known in ours as a master of lyric verse and as author of the philosophical poem The Testament of Beauty (1929). Of his famous collection of lyric poetry, The Shorter Poems (1890), A. E. Housman said that all of it was so excellent that anthologists would have great difficulty in making their selections. Because of his early retirement from the medical profession in 1881, made possible by an inheritance from his father which left him financially independent, Bridges was able to devote the rest of his long life to the writing of poetry and to the cultivation of wide-ranging interests including prosody, music, hymnology, literary criticism, editing, and typography. His interest in typography began early. He designed almost all his books, and...