Bridges, Robert

Robert Bridges was a prolific poet and prosodic theorist. His poetic experiments and critical writing about the varieties of verse forms possible in English have been largely overshadowed by the movements associated with Anglo-American modernism. Bridges's contributions to poetic theory rival and complicate the conventional narratives of the so-called rise of free verse. Bridges's work to understand and promote a variety of possible poetic modes in English was at once historical and future facing. Not only his prosodic thinking but his work on English pronunciation, phonetic spelling, and the state of English literary teaching influenced both linguistic and literary theories of prosody and phonetics well into the twentieth century.