Philip James Bailey

Philip James Bailey (born April 22, 1816, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, Eng.—died Sept. 6, 1902, Nottingham) was an English poet notable for his Festus (1839), a version of the Faust legend. Containing 50 scenes of blank-verse dialogue, about 22,000 lines in all, it was first published anonymously.

Bailey’s father, who himself published both prose and verse, owned and edited from 1845 to 1852 the Nottingham Mercury. The young Bailey received a local education until his 16th year, when he matriculated at the University of Glasgow. He did not, however, take his degree but moved in 1835 to London and entered Lincoln’s Inn. Without making serious practice of the law, he settled at Basford (in Nottingham) and for three years was occupied with the composition of Festus. He was associated with the Spasmodic school—poets whose aesthetic, based on Romantic ideas of association and intuition, rejected the restraint of literary form.