Robert Bridges, Eros and Psyche, 1885

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844-1930) was poet laureate from 1913 to his death. Originally a physician, he had to retire from his profession in 1882 because of ill health. He dedicated the rest of his life to poetry. As he was interested in the Classics, his work included masques on themes like Prometheus and Demeter, but he also composed sonnets and religious hymns.

His Eros and Psyche is a narrative poem, divided into twelve cantos, each representing a month of the year. Each canto has the number of stanzas of the relevant month’s days. Bridges adds a note to the end of the poem (p. 156-158) in which he claims that ‘the beautiful story is well known, and the version of Apuleius has been simply followed’ (156), even though he admits to some learned additions: 'the addition made to Homer’s description of Hera’s dress is an orientalism of the present writer'. He never, he says, read an English version of the story (i.e. not even Adlington’s widely available translation or Morris’ Earthly Paradise, which follows a comparable monthly structure). Many allusions to other ancient and more modern authors, e.g. the citation from Dante, Purgatorio canto XVI, make Bridges’ a learned, intertextual work.
 

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