Philip James Bailey (22 April 1816 – 6 September 1902) was an English poet, best known as the author of Festus.

Dropping the idea of becoming a Presbyterian minister, he began in 1833 to study law in a solicitor's office in London.

[3] Bailey is known almost exclusively by his one voluminous poem, Festus, first published anonymously in 1839, and then expanded with a second edition in 1845.

A vast pageant of theology and philosophy, it comprised in some twelve divisions an attempt to represent the relation of God to man, and to postulate "a gospel of faith and reason combined."

[5] The subsequent poems of Bailey, The Angel World (1850), The Mystic (1855), The Age (1858), and The Universal Hymn (1867), were failures.