18 Facts About Robert Bridges

1.

Robert Seymour Bridges was a British poet who was Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930.

2.

Robert Bridges's poems reflect a deep Christian faith, and he is the author of many well-known hymns.

3.

Robert Bridges was educated at Eton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

4.

Robert Bridges went on to study medicine in London at St Bartholomew's Hospital, intending to practise until the age of forty and then retire to write poetry.

5.

Robert Bridges practised as a casualty physician at his teaching hospital and subsequently as a full physician to the Great Northern Central Hospital.

6.

Robert Bridges was a physician to the Hospital for Sick Children.

7.

Lung disease forced Robert Bridges to retire from his post as physician in 1885, and from that point on he devoted himself to writing and literary research.

8.

Robert Bridges was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1900.

9.

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

10.

Robert Bridges was the father of poet Elizabeth Daryush and of the cabinet secretary Edward Bridges.

11.

Robert Bridges considered free verse to be too limiting, and explained his position in the essay "Humdrum and Harum-Scarum".

12.

Robert Bridges wrote verse plays, with limited success, and literary criticism, including a study of the work of John Keats.

13.

Robert Bridges's poetry was privately printed in the first instance, and was slow in making its way beyond a comparatively small circle of his admirers.

14.

At Oxford, Robert Bridges befriended Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is considered a superior poet but who owes his present fame to Robert Bridges's efforts in arranging the posthumous publication of his verse.

15.

Robert Bridges received advice from the young phonetician David Abercrombie on the reformed spelling system he was devising for the publication of his collected essays.

16.

Robert Bridges made an important contribution to hymnody with the publication in 1899 of his Yattendon Hymnal, which he created specifically for musical reasons.

17.

Robert Bridges wrote and translated historic hymns, and many of these were included in Songs of Syon and the later English Hymnal.

18.

Robert Bridges developed his own phonetic alphabet for English, with the help of the phonetician David Abercrombie.