Robert Bridges, the English poet laureate known for his work The Testament of Beauty, was something of an anomaly among his late-Victorian peers. A classicist, he was intrigued by eighteenth-century forms and had an abiding interest in themes usually associated with the Romantic movement. Bridges, in addition to his own writing, was known for his views on linguistics and the English language more generally.
He spent his childhood in Kent, but moved to the Northern English town of Rochdale in 1854 following his father's death and his mother's subsequent remarriage. He attended Eton College and then Cambridge, where he made one of the most lasting and influential friendships of his life, striking up a relationship with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. He was trained to become a physician and he practiced medicine until 1882, when he retired after surviving pneumonia. Following the end of his medical career, Bridges devoted himself entirely to literature.
In the period following his departure from medicine, while living with his family in England and, briefly, Switzerland, Bridges wrote well-known works of poetry and drama including "London Snow." Many of his popular verses were compiled in the collection The Shorter Poems of Robert Bridges. His familial relationships also had a profound effect on his poetry, driving him to pursue serious and sometimes patriotic themes. When his son Edward was wounded in the First World War, Bridges edited the collection The Spirit of Man, specifically aimed at increasing morale among wartime readers. When his daughter Margaret died in 1926, Bridges was motivated to complete his longer work The Testament of Beauty in order to seek comfort. He was named poet laureate of England in 1913.
Bridges was also an advocate for the preservation of "pure" English, and played a role in the 1913 founding of the Society for Pure English. This coalition of writers and academics aimed to bring American and British English speakers together in order to oppose the entry of "foreign" words into the English language.
Bridges died at his home near Oxford, England in 1930.
"London Snow" is an 1890 poem by Robert Bridges that describes the effects of a heavy snow on late-nineteenth-century London. The poem, in evoking the ethereality and beauty of the snow, implicitly criticizes industrial and urban lifestyles while...
