As a poet Bridges stands rather apart from the current of modern English verse, but his work has had great influence in a select circle, by its restraint, purity, precision, and delicacy yet strength of expression. It embodies a distinct theory of
prosody.
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 maintained that English prosody depended on the number of "stresses" in a line, not on the number of syllables, and that poetry should follow the rules of natural speech. 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, and he used the principle again in the long philosophical poem
The Testament of Beauty (1929), for which he received the
Order of Merit. His best-known poems, however, are to be found in the two earlier volumes of
Shorter Poems (1890, 1894). He also wrote verse plays, with limited success, and
literary criticism, including a study of the work of
John Keats.
Despite being made poet laureate in
1913, Bridges was never a very well-known poet and only achieved his great popularity shortly before his death with
The Testament of Beauty. However, his verse evoked response in many great English composers of the time. Among those to set his poems to music were
Hubert Parry, Gustav Holst, and later
Gerald Finzi.
At Corpus Christi College, Bridges became friends with
Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is now considered a superior poet but who owes his present fame to Bridges' efforts in arranging the posthumous publication (1916) of his verse.
Bridges' poetry was privately printed in the first instance, and was slow in making its way beyond a comparatively small circle of his admirers. His best work is to be found in his
Shorter Poems (1890), and a complete edition of his
Poetical Works (6 vols.) was published in 1898-1905. His chief volumes are
Prometheus (Oxford, 1883, privately printed), a "mask in the Greek Manner";
Eros and Psyche (1885), a version of the story from Apuleius;
The Growth of Love, a series of sixty-nine sonnets printed for private circulation in 1876 and 1889;
Shorter Poems (1890);
Nero (1885), a historical tragedy, the second part of which appeared in 1894;
Achilles in Scyros (1890), a drama;
Palicio (1890), a romantic drama in the Elizabethan manner;
The Return of Ulysses (1890), a drama in five acts;
The Christian Captives (1890), a tragedy on the same subject as Calderon's
El Principe Constante;
The Humours of the Court (1893), a comedy founded on the same dramatist's
El secreto á voces and on Lope de Vega's
El Perro del hortelano;
The Feast of Bacchus (1889), partly translated from the
Heauton-Timoroumenos of Terence;
Hymns from the Yattendon Hymnal (Oxford, 1899); and
Demeter, a Mask (Oxford, 1905).
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