THE POET LAUREATE

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 79, 27 December 1929, Page 10

THE POET LAUREATE

EIGHTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY

Dominion Special Service.

London, November 7.

The Poet Laureate was eighty-five years old last week, and the Oxford University Press has just published his new philosophical poem, The Testament of Beauty.” With it Dr. Bridges breaks the long silence for which he has so often been rebuked by captious critics whose ideal laureate is a facile bard who “drops into poetry” at . every stirring national eV Dr’ Bridges, in his pleasant retreat in the heart of the Matthew Arnold country at Boar’s Hill, where he has Mr Masefield and Professor Gilbeit Murray as neighbours, lives very much aloof from the madding crowd. He is however, occasionally seen in the streets of Oxford, a tall, commanding figure in , « re y . t V ee^ B ’ abundance of his silvery hair showing beneath his old-fashioned wide-awake Q If his published work has been scanty of late years, liis mental and artistic interests have never been keener. One of his chief cares has been to maintain the purity of his mother-tongue, and he has been a leading spirit in the propaganda work of the Society for Pure English and in the recent attempt to secure standard pronunciations in broadcasting. In these days poets are no longer among the loved of the gods who die young. Dr. Bridges’s three predecessors in the office of laureate attained an average age of eighty, but in the whole line of laureates only one has passed an age greater than that which Dr. Bridges has already attained. That was the eighteenthcentury actor-manager, Colley Cibber, who .died at the age of eighty-seven, and he certainly can, hardly be described as a poet.