“Play up! Play up! And Play the Game!”

Abstract

When Donald E. Stanford, coeditor of the Southern Review from 1965 to 1983, died in 1998, he left in manuscript a remarkable final critical book, the outgrowth of his lifelong study of English poetry written during the life of Robert Bridges (1844-1930). Earlier fruits of his interest in this British poet were Robert Bridges: Selected Poems (1974), In the Classic Mode: The Achievement of Robert Bridges (1978), and the two-volume Selected Letters of Robert Bridges (1983-1984). His study of four British writers, all friends of Bridges, has been edited with care by Rebecca W. Crump of Louisiana State University, who earlier edited Stanford's Complete Poems (2002) and Order in Variety (1991), a festschrift honoring his retirement. Stanford's scholarship provided him with a wide-ranging knowledge of a literary world in transition from the Victorian era into the modern. Within this milieu, often using unpublished materials, he sketches the lives of Margaret Louisa Woods, Mary Coleridge, Sir Henry Newbolt, and Robert C. Trevel yan. He discusses in detail their poetry, fiction, history, and criticism, and evaluates their work?especially the works for which each of them was most recognized during his or her lifetime. All four were once famous or highly esteemed, and all were literary friends of Bridges who corresponded with him and were influenced by his poetry and criticism. All wrote on themes favored by Bridges?nature, beauty in various forms, love, and important questions of faith and philosophy. Like Bridges, Newbolt and Trevelyan experimented with quantitative and syllabic verse. All except Coleridge