Robert Bridges

There Are Two of Him Americans are difficult to please--so are English visitors to the U. S. The Poet Laureate of England recently arrived in Manhattan, refused to be interviewed, refused to express any opinion at all of America, refused to give his address in Manhattan. This, of course, was not playing the game which so many Britishers have overplayed. The Victorian poet, beloved of Masefield, master technician, comes to grace the campus of Ann Arbor as visiting lecturer, patron saint, what you will; a post which was previously occupied by our own poet, Robert Frost. It has 'been rumored that at Oxford, near which he lives, the elderly poet finds time and takes pleasure in the company of young English versifiers. How will he find the atmosphere at the University of Michigan? It is more than probable that we shall never know; for Robert Bridges of England is a man of great erudition and reticence. He will seem a bit odd, I fancy, in his lion's cage in midwest America.

Mr. Bridges was born in 1844. He studied to be a physician and practised his profession until 1882 when he retired. At the death of Alfred Austin, in 1913, he was made Poet Laureate of England. His literary activities have been varied; but his chief fame is as a lyric poet. A new anthology of poetry edited by Mr. Bridges is soon to be published in this country.

It is naturally confusing to an American that we have our own Robert Bridges, who was born in 1858 at Shippensburg, Pa.; he is a most genial, attractive, popular gentleman, editor and poet. That Mr. Robert Bridges, American, editor of Scribner's, clubman, author of Bramble Brae, admirer of Roosevelt, was going to sit as a godhead on Ann Arbor campus seemed rather absurd when I heard it. How unhappy, to be sure, he would be; but then, I found I was mistaken. It was the Poet Laureate of England, imported for the little middle-western boys and girls to gaze upon.

Almost simultaneously with the English Mr. Bridges arrived the brilliant Bertrand Russell who is said already to have discovered many corruptions on our shores; and to be retiring shortly to his native heath without much investigation. All this is a tremendous aid to Anglo-American amity. Personally, we favor sending our own Robert Bridges to teach the court of St. James that there are human, charming, gentlemanly literary men still left in a somewhat overcrowded profession.

JF.