Edwin Emmanuel Bradford

Who was Edwin Emmanuel Bradford?

The Reverend Edwin Emmanuel Bradford was an English clergyman and Uranian poet and novelist. He attended Exeter College, Oxford, received his B.A. in 1884, and was awarded a D.D. He was vicar of Nordelph, Downham Market, Norfolk, from 1909 to 1944. Towards the beginning of his life Bradford was an Anglo-Catholic but he subsequently became a Modernist. He was at one time a great friend of The Reverend S. E. Cottam, M.A., with whom he had been an undergraduate classmate.

Bradford's verse was outspokenly homoerotic, but also remarkably popular during his lifetime given the prudery of Victorian England. W. H. Auden and John Betjeman were entertained by the apparent naïvety of Bradford's poetry. Betjeman's friend George Alfred Kolkhorst collected Bradford's novels.

Bradford's work can just barely be interpreted as a sign of innocent "romantic friendship" with youths, but several verses, such as "The Bather in the Blue Grotto at Capri" and "Alan", are plainly erotically inspired. Many of his poems are direct though sometimes self-effacing pleas of love to the young males in his life. In Bradford's own words: