Robert bridges poems

Robert bridges house palisades
Robert bridges bramble
Robert bridges house

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Bridges, Robert Seymour

Bridges, Robert Seymour (1844–1930), poet, was born at Walmer, Kent, on 23 October 1844, the fourth son and eighth child of John Thomas Bridges (1805–1853) and Harriett Elizabeth Affleck (1807–1897), third daughter of the Revd Sir Robert Affleck of Dalham, Suffolk.

Ancestry and early years

The Bridges family had been yeoman farmers in the Isle of Thanet since the sixteenth century, but John Thomas Bridges, who inherited the property in the late 1820s, did not want to farm and moved his young family to Walmer, where in 1832 he purchased Roseland, a house with some 6 acres of land perched on a height from which it was possible to look down to the sea and Walmer Castle, one of the coastal forts built by Henry VIII and a residence of the duke of Wellington in his capacity as lord warden of the Cinque Ports. There were several military bases in the area and two of Robert's elder brothers were to enter the forces. Robert's early years were spent in a happy family with Puseyite religious belief, music, and games in the large garden or on the rolling countr

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Robert Bridges

Letters to Rabindranath Tagore, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to Robert Graves, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to Edmund William Gosse, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to Harold Monro, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to William Rothenstein, Bridges papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to George Bernard Shaw, British Library, St Pancras, London, and Bodleian Library, Oxford

MSS, correspondence and literary letters, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Correspondence with Henry Bradley, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to A. H. Bullen, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Correspondence with Samuel Butler, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to Bertram Dobell, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to Alfred Fairbank, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to H. A. L. Fisher, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to Edmund Gosse, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to J. W. MacKail, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to Harold Minto, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to Gilbert Murray, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to Henry Newbolt, Bodleian Library, Oxford

Letters to Logan Pearsall S

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Robert Seymour Bridges holds a unique place in British literary history in that he was the only physician to be appointed to the post of Poet Laureate. His medical career had long finished though when we was appointed in 1913 and he remained in this post until his death in 1930. His fame as a poet came late in his lifetime and he was awarded the Order of Merit for the poem The Testament of Beauty in 1929. A deeply religious man he wrote a number of hymns that are still sung today around the world and his daughter was the famous poet Elizabeth Daryush.

He was born in the Kentish coastal town of Walmer on the 23^rd October 1844. His family circumstances were comfortable and he was sent to Eton College and then up to Oxford where he studied at Corpus Christi College. Here he struck up a long friendship with the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and, following the death of his friend, Bridges ensured that all of his work was published, thus establishing Hopkins’ name in the annals of the great poets of England.

He had ambitions to become a physician and took medical training at St Barth