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Youth (1844-1868)

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Bridges was born in Walmer, Kent, and educated at Eton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he was a distinguished oarsman on the boat crew. He graduated in 1867, after which he made a tour of Egypt and Jerusalem with his friend Lionel Muirhead.^[1]

Physician (1869-1881)

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Bridges enrolled as a medical student at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London in 1869, intending to practice until the age of forty and then retire to write poetry.^[2] He practised as a casualty physician at his teaching hospital (where he made a series of highly critical remarks about the Victorian medical establishment) and subsequently as a full physician to the Great (later Royal) Northern Hospital. He was also a physician to the Hospital for Sick Children.^[3] In June of 1881 he contracted pneumonia, which required him to move temporarily to the milder climate of Italy; he did not fully recover and return to England until May of the next year.^[4] At this point he retired from his career as a physician; shortly thereafter he moved with his mother to the secluded village of Yattendon, Berkshire.^[5] Although he wrote poetry throughout this period (virtually his earliest extant verse dates from 1869^[6]), Bridges only slowly accumulated a body of work with which he himself was satified: he later attempted to suppress both his first volume of poetry (1873) and the first edition of his sonnet sequence The Growth of Love (1876); his next 2 volumes of poetry (1879 and 1880) were published anonymously.^[7] Many of these poems, especially from the 1873 volume, were either revised or eliminated completely from his later collections.

Poet (1882-1899)

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After his retirement, convalescence, and retreat to Yattendon, Bridges experienced a period of great productivity. During the 1880s, he produced a second much-expanded edition of The Growth of Love, the long poem Eros and Psyche, and 8 of his 10 dramas and masques. In 1884 he married Monica Waterhouse, daughter of Alfred Waterhouse R.A. who owned the estate to which Bridges had recently moved. The Bridges had 3 children: Elizabeth (who became a poet in her own right) in 1887, Margeret in 1889, and Edward in 1892.^[8] He closed the decade with the publication of Shorter Poems, Books I - IV, which contained all that he wished to preserve of his earlier verse, along with new verse in a similar vein. It was by this single work that Bridges the poet was known for most of the rest of his life. "Of this book A. E. Houseman said that no volume of English verse had ever attained such perfection and anthologists of the future would have immense difficulty in making a selection."^[9]

In the 1890s he added a fifth book to the Shorter Poems, wrote a sequel to his verse drama Nero, and published a further volume of short poems, New Poems. Meanwhile he had published the first edition of his detailed study of John Milton's methods of versification, and a literary criticism of John Keats. The period was capped off by an edition of his complete Poetical Works in 6 volumes published from 1898-1905.

Prosodist, essayist, and laureate (1900-1925)

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"During the quarter century in which he wrote little of poetic importance, 1900-1925, Bridges was occupied with experiements in classical prosody, studies of Milton's versification, the preparation of essays and anthologies, and investigations for the Society for Pure English."^[10]

In the book Milton's Prosody, he took an empirical approach to examining Milton's use of blank verse, and developed the controversial theory that Milton's practice was essentially syllabic. He considered free verse to be too limiting, and explained his position in the essay "Humdrum and Harum-Scarum".

He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1913, the only medical graduate to have held the office.

Late reflorescence (1926-1930)

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His own efforts to "free" verse resulted in the poems he called "Neo-Miltonic Syllabics", which were collected in New Verse (1925). The meter of these poems was based on syllables rather than accents.

Beginning in 1925 or 1926 he began work on a long philosophical poem, utilizing neo-Miltonic syllabics in a 12-syllable line, which was to become The Testament of Beauty. As his writing progressed, Bridges became increasingly infirm and acutely aware of the possibility that he may not live to complete it; indeed the last of the 4 books was spirited through the press more quickly than the previous 3 had been.^[11] Nevertheless the complete work was published on 24 October 1929 (the day after Bridges' 85th birthday), and was not only a critical success^[12], but also Bridges' first and only popular work, requiring 8 reprints during 1929 and 1930 alone. By 1946, nearly 68,000 copies had been sold in England and the US.^[13] For this work, Bridges received the Order of Merit.

Bridges died in 1930 at his home.