Robert Bridges was born in Walmer, Kent, to father John Thomas Bridges and mother Harriet Elizabeth Affleck. He entered Eton College in 1854 and started writing poetry, and enrolled at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in the Michaelmas term of 1863. In 1872 he joined the Savile Club where he got to know Edmund William Gosse.
In 1884, Bridges married Monica Waterhouse, who was a cousin of Roger Fry. Through this marriage, Bridges was introduced to a younger generation of writers who included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Graves, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. In 1912, William Rothenstein introduced Bridges to Rabindranath Tagore, whom he met again in Oxford in 1913. Tagore had won the Nobel Prize for Gitanjali in 1913 and Bridges wanted to include excerpts from it in his anthology, The Spirit of Man (1915).
Gitanjali had been introduced to the British public by W. B. Yeats in 1912. Yeats and Rothenstein were to play an instrumental role in the communication between Tagore and Bridges. The controversy surrounding Tagore’s inclusion in Bridges’ anthology stems from Bridges’ desire to refine the English of one of the Gitanjali poems. But Tagore refused and it was only the intervention of Yeats, at Bridges’ request, that persuaded Tagore to let Bridges make the changes. Bridges only met Tagore on very few occasions; otherwise their relationship was entirely through correspondence and mutual friends.
One of those mutual friends was Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy, a student at Oxford, who assisted Bridges in choosing ‘Oriental’ poems for his anthology. In a letter to Bridges dated 8 July 1914, Tagore mentions his affection for Suhrawardy: ‘I am glad you speak so well of Suhrawardy for whom I felt a very great attraction when I came to know him in Oxford, and the memory of my meeting with him still gives me pleasure.’
Basanta Kumar Mallik enrolled at Oxford in 1912 and soon became a frequent guest at Bridges’ Boar’s Hill home, where also W. B. Yeats was a frequent visitor.
In 1913, Bridges was made poet laureate and he remained a best selling poet throughout the 1920s. He died at his home on 21 April 1930.