Robert Bridges (1844–1930) is perhaps the most conspicuous example of that faintly alarming figure, the happy poet. His strenuously archaic diction, his eccentric devotion to syllabic and quantitative measures, his bizarre attempts to simplify English spelling, as well as his unvaryingly placid manner, all obstruct the appreciation of his genius; but it is his happiness, a matter of conviction as well as temperament, that most repels contemporary readers. We prefer our poets to be wracked with anguish or, at least, chronically depressed and raving on Paxil. We want dark nights of the soul from our bards, not breezy afternoons. Happiness looks suspect; it appears obtuse, oblivious, smug. Of all states of mind, happiness is the most fleeting; it ignores past and future to celebrate the ephemeral moment; it obviates memory as well as prophecy. In this sense, Bridges’s poetry seems not simply dated but dateless. It contains no “moment in the rose garden.” For Bridges the garden is ever-present and it’s always rosy. He was the exact opposite of the poète maudit; he was, in fact—horrible to say—a poète béni.

Bridges occasionally wrote of dejection and melancholy, but even these poems display an unseemly equanimity. By old convention, rooks and crows are birds of evil omen, yet in Bridges’s poems they tend to be, as he put it in “The Garden in September,” resolutely “on business bent.” They may hold “stormy council” in the high trees, but they constitute an “ancient polity,” in league with the