Robert Bridges was a trained doctor working in London hospitals until 1882, a classicist and poet who served as Poet Laureate from 1913 until his death in 1930. Educated at Eton and Corpus Christi college, Bridges edited and published the poems of his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins after his premature death.

In the many letters that passed between the two poets after their first meeting as undergraduates at Oxford in 1863, Bridges emerges as a faithful, gently encouraging friend. However, though he recognized Hopkins’s poetic genius, he was alarmed by his bold and unconventional experiments with language and rhythm.

Bridges also rejected contemporary fashions in poetry such as the decadence of late Victorian poetry and, later, the complexities of modernism, to develop his own more measured and accessible style. As a poet, he valued precision with language matched by restraint with form, qualities that are displayed in ‘London Snow’.