Rupert Brooke Biography and List of Works

English poet of exceptional promise, who died a young man in World War I. Brooke's best-known work is the sonnet sequence 1914 AND OTHER POEMS (1915),which contains the famous 'The Soldier.' His death made him the hero of the first phase of the war and a symbol of all the gifted young people destroyed by the conflict. However, Brooke's poetry with its emphasis on the heroic, dreamy and patriotic mood of the time, went out of public fashion as the reality of the war was fully understood.

"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England."
(from The Soldier)

Brooke was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, where his father taught classics and was a housemaster at Rugby School. In his childhood Brooke immersed himself in English poetry and twice won the school poetry prize. In 1906 he went to King's college, Cambridge, and became friends with G.E. Moore, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, and Leonard Fry, members of the future Bloomsbury Group. In 1910 Brooke's father died suddenly, and Brooke became for a short time a deputy housemaster at Rugby. Thereafter Brooke lived on an allowance from his mother. In 1911 he worked on a thesis on the playwright John Webster and Elizabethan drama, and travelled in Germany and Italy. In England he was a leader of a group of young 'Neo-pagans', who slept outdoors, embraced a religion of nature, and swam naked - among others Virginia Woolf swam with Brooke in Grantchester.

In 1911 Brooke first collection of verse, POEMS,was published. His work was featured in the periodical Georgian Poetry, the periodical he was instrumental in founding along with his friend, editor Sir Edward Marsh. Over the next twenty years, the book sold almost 100 000 copies. In 1911 Brooke was secretly engaged to Noel Olivier, five years his junior. The affair was idealistic and ultimately frustrating. Subsequently he had an affaitr with the actress Cathleen Nesbitt. Overworked and emotionally overextended, Brooke suffered a nervous breakdown. In the spring of 1912, Brooke and Ka Cox went to Germany, where he wrote 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester', which is among his most admired poems. Ka Cox almost certainly bore his stillborn child. In England Brooke assembled with others the hugely successful anthology Georgian Poetry: 1911-1912. Brooke's thesis brought him a fellowship at King's College in 1913.

Between 1913 and 1914 Brooke wandered in North America and the South Seas, and depicts his impressions in his LETTERS FROM AMERICA (1916). He spent three months on Tahiti, where he wrote some of his finest poems, and had an affair with a woman called Taatamata, commemorated in 'Tiare Tahiti'. In 1914 Brooke became friends with Winston Churchill and the Asquith family.

Brooke's career as a writer was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. He was commissioned in Churchill's Royal Navy Division, and joined the Dardanelles expedition. Brooke died of septicaemia as a result of a mosquito bite, on a hospital ship off Scyros on April 23, 1915, and was buried on the island. The legend was established, and enhanced when Winston Churchill joined those writing obituaries. As time passed, and the works of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and others began to appear, Brooke's appeal began to wane.. Brooke is now chiefly valued for his lighter verse, for the Tahiti poems, and for a few sonnets.

For further reading: Rupert Brooke by William E. Laskowski (1994); The Neo-Pagans by P. Delany (1987); Rupert Brooke by J. Lehman (1980); Rupert Brooke by R.B. Persall (1979); Rupert Brooke by V. Woolf and G. Keynes (1978); Rubert Brooke: A Biography by Christopher Vernon Hassall (1964); A Bibliography of Rupert Brooke by G. Keynes (1959); Red Wine of Youth by A. Stringer (1948); Men and Memories by A.C. Benson (1924); Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination by Walter de la Mare (1919) - Note: Geogians, a term generally applied to authors who wrote during the reign of George V, 1910-36, and specifically referring to the poets included in the five volume anthology Georgian Poetry (1912-22). Critics - among them the Bloomsbury group - assailed its naivety. - James Strachey: "Rupert wasn't nearly so nice as people now imagine; but he was a great deal cleverer." (see Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey 1905-1914, ed. by Keith Hale; 1998) - Virginia Woolf: "So much has been written of his personal beauty that to state one's own first impression of him in that respect needs some audacity, since the first impression was of a type so conventionally handsome and English as to make it inexpressive or expressive only of something that one might be inclined half-humorously to disparage. He was the type of English young manhood at its healthiest and most vigorous. Perhaps at the particular stage he had then reached, following upon the decadent phase of his first Cambridge days, he emphasized this purposely: he was consciously and defiantly pagan." (from Books and Portraits by Virginia Woolf, ed. by Mary Lyon, 1977).

THE PYRAMIDS, (1904)
THE BASTILLE, (1905)
PURITANISM IN THE EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA, (1910)
POEMS, (1911)
The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, (1912)
THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE LATTER APIUS AND VIRGINIA, (1913)
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF RUPERT BROOKE, (1915)
JOHN WEBSTER AND THE ELISABETHAN DRAMA, (1915)
LITHUANIA: A DRAMA IN ONE ACT, (1915)
LETTERS FROM AMERICA, (1916)
SELECTED POEMS, (1917)
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF RUPERT BROOKE, (1918)
LITHUANIA, (1922)
A LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE POETRY REVIEW, (1929)
COMPLETE POEMS, (1932)
TWENTY POEMS, (1935)
THE POETICAL WORKS OF RUPERT BROOKE, (1946)
DEMOCRACY AND THE ARTS, (1946)
THE POETICAL WORKS, (1949)
POEMS OF RUPERT BROOKE, (1952)
THE PROSE OF RUPERT BROOK, (1956)
THE LETTERS, (1968)
RUPERT BROOKE: A REAPPRAISAL AND SELECTION FROM HIS WRITINGS, (1971)
LETTERS FROM RUPERT BROOKE TO HIS PUBLISHER, (1911)
RUPERT BROOKE IN CANADA, (1978)
THE POEMS OF RUPERT BROOKE, (1987)
SONG OF LOVE: THE LETTERS OF RUPERT BROOKE AND NOEL OLIVIER, (1991)
FRIENDS AND APOSTLES, (1998)