SOURCE: “Profundity Revisited: Bridges and His Critics,” in The Dalhousie Review, Vol. 44, No. 2, Summer 1964, pp. 172-79.

In the following essay, Beum argues against the modern opinion that Bridges's poetry is merely concerned with “flowers” and meter rather than with serious and complicated ideas.

“The fact is that Bridges' poetry is a curious combination of consummate style, pure formal beauty, and a complete lack of profundity of thought”.¹ This scarcely intelligible comment from one of the Kunitz and Haycraft dictionaries is representative of the kind of sentiment one is likely to hear whenever Bridges' name crops up. We make legends about the authors we never read, as well as about those we do. The Bridges legend is two stories. In one of them he is a late-Victorian flowers poet, one of the mob of laureates who write with ease lyrically descriptive verse, a Palgrave darling goldenly diffuse; in the...