Rupert Brooke
(1887–1915)

Although Rupert Brooke had established himself as a poet before World War I, it was the war and Brook's early death that fostered his almost legendary fame. A handsome, privileged youth, an accomplished athlete, and an intellectual, he attracted a host of influential friends who mourned his loss and celebrated his achievements. Brook's best poems, filled with striking phrases, are exuberant with delight in the simple pleasures of living.

Rupert Brooke was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, and educated at the most famous public school there, where his father was an assistant master. He graduated from King's College, Cambridge, and studied for a time in Munich, Germany. A long love affair ended unhappily for Brooke, after which he traveled in the United States, Canada, and the South Pacific, making a pilgrimage to the home of Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa. His poetry at the time echoes that of John Donne and occasionally A. E. Housman.

When war broke out in 1914, Brooke obtained a commission in the Hood Battalion of the Royal Naval Division. "Well, if Armageddon's on," he said at the time, "I suppose one should be there." After participating in a disastrous British expedition to Antwerp, he was ordered to the Dardanelles, where the British hoped to strike a blow against the Turks. He contracted blood poisoning on the way and entered a French military hospital on the Greek island of Skiros in the Aegean Sea. He died there on April 23, St. George's Day.

Brooke's war sonnets, which had appeared a few weeks before his death, gained extraordinary notice in the aftermath. Winston Churchill praised them in the London Times. The sonnets, traditional and idealistic, were among the last from the soldier-poets of World War I that expressed an unalloyed patriotism. Brooke had seen little of the trench warfare that so altered the vision of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and other poets who served in the army.

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