Biography

Elizabeth Daryush was an English poet.

Life and Career

Daughter of British poet laureate Robert Bridges, Elizabeth Daryush had a privileged upbringing in Victorian and Edwardian England. Although she followed her father's lead not only in choosing poetry as her life's work but also in the traditional style of poetry she chose to write, the themes of her work are often critical of the upper classes and the social injustice their privilege levied upon others. This characteristic was not present in her early work, including her first two books of poems, published under the name Elizabeth Bridges, which appeared while she was still in her twenties. According to John Finlay, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Daryush's "early poetry is preoccupied with rather conventional subject matter and owes a great deal to the Edwardians."

After she married Ali Akbar Daryush in her mid- thirties and lived in Persia for four years, Elizabeth Daryush's poetry took a subtle though marked departure from her early work. Finlay observed that "The Last Man (1936) suggests a new awareness on her part of the anguish and pain caused by the profound changes that transformed English social life during the 1930s." Yvor Winters, writing in American Review, noted that "she seems to be increasingly conscious. . .of social injustice, of the mass of human suffering." It was also with The Laughing Man that Daryush began to refine the stylistic experiments her father had undertaken with syllabic meter.

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