Robert Seymour Bridges OM was a British poet who was Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930. A doctor by training, he achieved literary fame only late in life. His poems reflect a deep Christian faith, and he is the author of many well-known hymns.
Robert Bridges
Full Name: Bridges,
Robert, 1844-1930
Birth Year: 1844
Death Year: 1930
- Robert S. Bridges (b. Walmer, Kent, England, 1844; d. Boar's Hill, Abingdon, Berkshire, England, 1930) In a modern listing of important poets Bridges' name is often omitted, but in his generation he was consid¬ered a great poet and fine scholar. He studied medicine and practiced as a physician until 1881, when he moved to the village of Yattendon. He had already written some poetry, but after 1881 his literary career became a full-time occupation, and in 1913 he was awarded the position of poet laureate in England. Bridges published The Yattendon Hymnal (1899), a collection of one hundred hymns (forty-four written or translated by him with settings mainly from the Genevan psalter, arranged for unaccompanied singing. In addition to volumes of poetry, Bridges also published A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing (1899) and About Hymns (1911).
He took the B.M.
degree in 1874, and served as house physician to Patrick Black from 1875 to
1876 and as casualty physician from 1877 to 1879, publishing a graphic Account
of the Casualty Department in the St. Bartholomew’s Reports (1878). He was
elected physician to the Great Northern Hospital in 1876 and assistant physician
to the Hospital for Sick Children a year later. But in 1881 an attack of
pneumonia, which required a prolonged convalescence, brought his medical career
to an end, three years earlier than he had expected to retire. The rest of his
life was given to the poetry which made his name famous. Medicine had, indeed,
delayed Robert Bridges’ emergence as a poet, but it cannot be gainsaid that the
result was fruitful. He acquired through medicine a sympathetic insight into
his fellow men and an experience that was not without influence on the last,
and perhaps the greatest, of his works, The Testament of Beauty (1929).
Robert Bridges married in 1884 Monica, daughter of Alfred
Waterhouse, R.A, of Yattendon, Berkshire, where he was then living, and had a
son and two daughters. He died at Boars Hill, Oxford, in Chilswell House, which
he had built in 1907. He had been poet laureate since 1913, and had received
the Order of Merit in 1929.
G H Brown
[B.M.J., 1930; D.N.B., 1922-30, 115; Presidential Address to
R.C.P., 1931, 7; Al.Oxon., i, 159]
