Bridges Updated

BOOK REVIEWS persuasion—citing authorities and providing literary frames of reference —until finally he establishes narrative authority over his fellow sailors. They now help to "write" the stories in a different way, not by quarreling but by requesting information and interpreting events. When Brown offered these poems to Macmillan in 1880 for a collected edition, he soon discovered that George Lillie Craik, one of the editors, would prove to be as demanding as any Tom Baynes had met with in the forecastle. With an eye towards the lucrative market in the south of England, Craik told Brown to shorten the poems and excise their offensive coarseness. Brown fumed and protested, lamenting privately that he was being asked to emasculate his poems to make them suitable for the drawing-room table, but in the end, anxious to publish and find an audience, he agreed, cutting one-seventh of the text. The drama of storytelling was thus recapitulated in Brown's bowdlerizing the poems to satisfy his publisher, but this was a tragic drama, impoverishing rather than enriching the text. Sutton has a special reason for deploring these changes because in addition to robbing the poems of their strong flavor they also removed most of the interplay between Tom Baynes and bis listeners, the very element that Sutton finds so interesting. It is interesting and Sutton makes us see it so, for he is a good storyteller himself, writing well and entertainingly throughout. In the end he succeeds not only in arguing his thesis that Brown has an important role in the development of narrative technique, but also in creating the impression that the Fo'c's'le Yarns is worth reading for the simple pleasure of it, that is, for the stories themselves as well as for the drama in their telling. ^^ Bright Eastern Kentucky University Bridges Updated Lee Templin Hamilton. Robert Bridges: An Annotated Bibliography, 1873-1988. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991. 243 pp. $39.50 LEE HAMILTON'S comprehensive annotated bibliography of the work of Robert Bridges (Poet Laureate 1913-1930) successfully fills a longstanding gap in late Victorian and early twentieth-century studies. It is the first comprehensive Bridges bibliography since George L. McKay's, published in 1933. As Hamilton points out in his introduction, Robert Bridges (1844— 1930) is a perfect example of a transitional literary figure possessing "some characteristics that are distinctly and uniquely Victorian, and 125 ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 others entirely modern," but as Hamilton also states, he deserves to be studied not only as a transitional poet and man of letters but as a writer of "diverse skills and achievements" peculiarly his own. He was the master of the short lyric written in conventional accentual-syllabic meter, but he also engaged (together with his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins) in extremely interesting experiments in stress prosody, as Bridges called it, or in sprung rhythm, to use Hopkins's term. He also wrote two thousand lines of verse in classical, that is quantitative, meters, and towards the end of his life he composed a long philosophical poem, The Testament of Beauty, in a meter of his own invention which he called neo-Miltonic syllables of "loose Alexandrines." The Testament of Beauty, as Hamilton's copious annotations show, was received with wild acclaim by a majority of the reviewers, who compared it favorably with The Prelude, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and De Rerum Natura. Edmund Blunden wrote that Bridges is "a triumph of the English race," and the enthusiastic reviewer for the London Mercury said, "a thousand years hence men will still read and learn from him." Bridges was also a champion of reformed spelling and he insisted on having his collection of distinguished essays in literary and social criticism set in phonetic type of his own devising. He also proved himself to be a responsible editor who showed, to quote Hamilton again, "careful critical judgement" in his selection of poems for the first edition of Hopkins's poetry published in 1918, twenty-nine years after Hopkins died. The timing was right, according to Hamilton, for the poetry reading public was not ready for Hopkins's highly experimental verse until after the Imagist...