Robert Bridges' New Book
Egypt had vowel-chants, and the middle ages their polyrythmical sequaires and litanies.
And after all these things came the English exposition of 1851 and the Philadelphia Centennial, introducing cast-iron house decorations and machine-made wood fret-work, and there followed a generation of men with minds like the cast-iron ornament, and they set their fretful desire upon machine-like regularity. Miss Mitford had objected to Dante because he was "Gothic"; the indigenous Anglo-Saxon rhythms were neglected because society did not read Anglo-Saxon. And the most imitative generation of Americans ever born on our continent set themselves to exaggerating the follies of England.
For these provincials it is what I can call by no more fitting name than "a smack in the eye" that Robert Bridges, Laureate, whose name is almost a synonym for classic and scholarly poetry, should have labeled one poem in his latest book "experiment in free verse."
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Robert Bridges' work has been always a subject for debate. There is the party which compares it to the innumerable pseudo-renaissance-classic façades of the buildings of the University of London, etc., and finds it unreadable; and the opposing party which says that if one will only read through the collected edition he will find a reasonable number of poems which will stand comparison with the best in the language.
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