About the Author
Andrew Cecil Bradley was born in 1851. His father, the Revered Charles Bradley, was a clergyman renowned for the powerful and eloquent sermons he preached to his congregations. Reverend Bradley was also a prolific progenitor, siring twenty-two children (of which Andrew Cecil was the youngest). Andrew Cecil Bradley seems to have developed a passion for poetry early in life. He especially admired the great English Romantics Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. At seventeen Bradley enrolled at Oxford University, where he went from undergraduate to fellow, then lecturer, at Balliol College, a hub of progressive thinking and intellectual skepticism about traditional knowledge, such as literal interpretations of the Bible. Although a philosopher by training, Bradley found subsequent academic positions in first Liverpool, then Glasgow, chiefly in modern literature. In 1901 Bradley returned to Oxford to accept a five year position as Chair of Poetry.
