{"id":42188,"date":"2012-11-20T16:30:53","date_gmt":"2012-11-20T21:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=42188"},"modified":"2013-04-22T15:26:30","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T19:26:30","slug":"early-promise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/20\/early-promise\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Promise"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/8183352263_2cffa961c5_o.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-42189\" title=\"8183352263_2cffa961c5_o\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/8183352263_2cffa961c5_o-247x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"247\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/8183352263_2cffa961c5_o-247x300.jpg 247w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/8183352263_2cffa961c5_o.jpg 540w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>You may be familiar with Robert Bridges, who served as England\u2019s Poet Laureate. But chances are, you are unfamiliar with the work of Digby Mackworth Dolben, a school friend of Bridges\u2019s who died at only nineteen. An eccentric and a zealous Anglo-Catholic, long after his death Dolben continued to exercise a compelling hold over his circle, which included Gerard Manley Hopkins. In 1915, Bridges had published a volume of his school friend\u2019s poetry. <a href=\"http:\/\/publicdomainreview.org\/2012\/11\/14\/the-strangely-troubled-life-of-digby-mackworth-dolben\/\" target=\"_blank\">As Carl Miller writes<\/a> in the <em>Public Domain Review<\/em>,<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><em>The Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben<\/em> does have a curious interest of its own. The poems themselves are indifferent, at best the juvenilia of an artist whose promise had been thwarted by an early death, but Bridges introduced them with a lengthy memoir that depicts Dolben\u2019s strangely troubled life with understated skill.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>After his premature death by drowning, Hopkins (into whose relationship with the young man many a scholar has looked) wrote, \u201cthere can very seldom have happened the loss of so much beauty (in body and mind and life) and of the promise of still more as there has been in his case.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You may be familiar with Robert Bridges, who served as England\u2019s Poet Laureate. But chances are, you are unfamiliar with the work of Digby Mackworth Dolben, a school friend of Bridges\u2019s who died at only nineteen. An eccentric and a zealous Anglo-Catholic, long after his death Dolben continued to exercise a compelling hold over his [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[9276,4254,165,9277],"class_list":["post-42188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-digby-mackworth-dolben","tag-gerard-manley-hopkins","tag-poetry","tag-robert-bridges"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Early Promise by Sadie Stein<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 20, 2012 \u2013 You may be familiar with Robert Bridges, who served as England\u2019s Poet Laureate. 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