Elizabeth Daryush
Elizabeth Bridges Daryush (1887-1977) was an English poet known for her social commentary and refined poetic style. Born into a privileged family, her father was the poet laureate Robert Bridges, and her upbringing in the literary circles of Oxford provided her with a rich cultural foundation. After her marriage to Ali Akbar Daryush in 1923, she lived in Persia until 1927, an experience that significantly influenced her writing.
Daryush's poetry is characterized by her elegant diction and innovative approach to syllabics, refining her father's method by focusing on pronounced syllables. Her work often critiques the inequalities of society, as exemplified in poems like "Children of Wealth in Your Warm Nursery," where she highlights the ignorance of privilege. Although her style diverged from modernist trends of her time, scholars have recently reevaluated her contributions, recognizing her adherence to structured metrics and poignant themes.
Despite facing challenges, including near blindness in her later years, Daryush's literary legacy endures, with critics advocating for greater appreciation of her work. Her life reflects a commitment to social awareness and artistic integrity amid the complexities of early 20th-century literature.
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Subject Terms
Elizabeth Daryush
Poet
- Born: December 5, 1887
- Birthplace: London, England
- Died: April 7, 1977
- Place of death: Stockwell, England
Biography
Elizabeth Bridges Daryush was born in 1887 into a life that seemed marked by all the powers of Victorian and Edwardian privilege. Her father was England’s poet laureate, Robert Bridges. Her mother, Mary Monica Waterhouse Bridges, was the daughter of a well-known architect. The family lived near Oxford, where her father had contact with the greats of nineteenth century English poetry, including Gerard Manly Hopkins, John Masefield, Robert Graves, and Thomas Hardy. Elizabeth was privately educated. In 1923, she married Ali Akbar Daryush, an Oxford student, and moved with him to Persia, where they lived until 1927.
Back in England, they lived on Boar’s Hill overlooking Oxford, near her childhood home. She had already begun publishing some poems before her marriage, but it was after her stay in Persia that her poetry began to take on one of the themes which threaded through the rest of her writing life—a social awareness that led her to criticize the privileged world from which she came. Two other qualities mark her work as well. One is her commitment to the sort of archaic, elegant diction against which writers such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound reacted. The second is her refinement of her father’s use of syllabics, the patterning of a poetic line by syllable count rather than by accent. Her father had counted all syllables, including those that existed only in a word’s spelling; Daryush counted only syllables that could be heard in pronunciation. Daryush’s social criticism can be seen in poems such as “Children of Wealth in Your Warm Nursery,” where she pictures the children of the title sitting in a warm window seat, where they watch a winter storm outside; in their ignorance, they cannot imagine the pains the weather places on the poor.
Scholars have recently reexamined Daryush’s work, noting that contemporary tastes in diction have unfairly consigned her work to obscurity. They praise the effects of her metrics and tight rhyme schemes, her themes which grapple with the wrongs that lie in all social structures, and her stoicism in living with those wrongs. In her long life, Daryush’s work underwent little development or change after the growth of her social conscience, but her reputation has been championed by the work of critics such as Donald Davie and Roy Fuller. She was nearly blind in her later years; she died in 1977.