Lesser-Known Poets

Robert Bridges was Born on October 23, 1844, In Walmer, Kent, England, Bridges began writing poetry when he enrolled in Eton College in 1854. 1863 is when Bridges enrolled at Corpus Christi College at Oxford University and became friends with Gerald Manley Hopkins and they would remain friends until Hopkins’ death in 1889.

Bridges became Hopkins’ literary executor where he would collect and edit his friends’ poems so they could be published after his death.

“In 1869, Bridges registered as a student at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.” he would initially fail his medical exam in 1873 and in the summer, go on to study medicine in Dublin.

In 1873, Bridges would publish his first poems and receive an MB in 1874. In 1881, Bridges contracted pneumonia and would retire from working in hospitals. Bridges spent the rest of his life devoting himself to studying and writing poems while nearly in domestic seclusion. “While in his prolific period” Bridges went on to publish many long poems, dramas, and poetry collections, “some of which contained his experiments using a meter based on syllables rather than accents.” If you read “The Shorter Poems Of Robert Bridges” you will find a lot of popular verses in the book.

In 1913, Bridges was named Poet Laureate of England, a position he held until his death in 1913. https://poets.org/poet/robert-bridges

Gary Snyder was born on May 8, 1930, in San Francisco. “Snyder published numerous poems” and just to name a few, he wrote, “The Gary Snyder Reader”, “Mountains and River Without End”, “The Practice of the Wild”, “Turtle Island”, along with many other literary works.

Snyder has been awarded many awards including “The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, The Bollingen Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and many more.” Snyder was also voted the Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003. Sydner is now 91 years old and is now a professor of English at the University of California, Davis

https://poets.org/poet/gary-snyder

Lastly, Elizabeth Barret Browning was born on March 6, 1806, at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England. “Browning was an English poet of the Romantic Movement.” Browning was the oldest of 12 children and was the first baby born in England in over 200 years in her family.

Browning was homeschooled so she read passages like “Paradise Lost”, penned by Shakespeare, and many other great works before the age of ten.

At the age of 12, “Browning wrote her first “epic” poem that consisted of four books of rhyming couplets”. At the age of 14, Browning developed a lung alignment that affected her for the rest of her life which resulted in Browning being treated with morphine for the rest of her life.

Browning also suffered a spinal injury while saddling a pony, but that didn’t stop her education. While being a teenager, Browning taught herself Hebrew to read the old testament.

She then took interest in Greek studies and would become active in the bible and missionary societies of her church. In 1826, Browning published her collection “An Essay on Mind and Other Poems”.

Later in life Browning’s brother drowned while they were both at sea and she returned home emotionally broken. For the rest of her life she continued to write poems such as “Poems”, ``Sonnets from the Portuguese”, which were dedicated to her husband, “Poems Before Congress” etc. she later passed on June 29, 1861, she died in her husband’s Robert Browning’s arms.