Rupert Brooke

Rupert Chawner Brooke (3 August 1887 - 23 April 1915) was an English poet.

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) in 1915. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Rupert Brooke
Born	August 3 1887(1887-Template:MONTHNUMBER-03) Rugby, Warwickshire, England
Died	April 23 1915(1915-Template:MONTHNUMBER-23) (aged 27) Aegean Sea, off the island of Skyros
Cause of death	Sepsis
Resting place	Skyros, Greece
Nationality	English
Education	Rugby School; King's College, Cambridge
Employer	Sidgwick & Jackson (Publisher)
Known for	poetry

Life

Overview

Brooke is known best for his war sonnets written during World War I (especially The Soldier). During his life he was also known for his boyish good looks, which prompted Irish poet William Butler Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England".

Youth and education

Brooke was born at 5 Hillmorton Road in the market town of Rugby, Warwickshire, on 3 August 1887, the 2nd of 3 brothers. His father was William Parker Brooke, a master at Rugby School, and his mother was Mary Ruth (Cotterill).

His school life, in his father’s house at Rugby, was normal and happy. He played cricket and football for the school, read widely in English, wrote quantities of verse in the obsolescent manner of the nineties, and won prizes with poems on The Pyramids and The Bastille.

In 1906 he went to King's College, Cambridge, where he soon entered into the full swim of university life and became a popular and conspicuous figure. Young Cambridge, in his mind, was to be the centre of the most vital movements in literature, art, drama, and social progress; and to this end he worked. He was a member of the ‘Apostles’, and became president of the University Fabian society, which he hoped to convert from what seemed to him a hard and selfish outlook to an ideal based on sympathy rather than on class warfare, and on faith in what he called ‘the real though sometimes overgrown goodness of all men’. He took a leading part in founding the Marlowe society, and acted in its performances of Dr. Faustus and Comus.

He read for the classical tripos, but worked harder at English. ‘There are only three things in the world,’ he said,—‘one is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.’ His most distinctively favorite poet was John Donne, and he made a careful study of the Elizabethans, winning the Harness prize with an essay, Puritanism in the Early Drama, and a fellowship at King’s (1912) with a dissertation on John Webster.

Career

After taking his degree in 1909, Brooke made himself a 2nd home at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, where he settled down for the next 3 years to a life of reading and bathing, varied by visits to London, Munich, and Berlin, and by a term at Rugby during which he acted as house-master after the sudden death of his father early in 1910. In December 1911 he published a volume of Poems, which aroused a good deal of interest, and next year he wrote a one-act play, Lithuania, which showed considerable dramatic power.

Meanwhile he was spending more and more time in London. His remarkable and prepossessing good looks and his evident goodwill made him an attractive figure, and he was beginning to be known among a large and varied circle of interesting friends as a man of exceptional promise and charm—‘a creature’, as was written of him by Henry James, ‘on whom the gods had smiled their brightest’.

In May 1913 Brooke set out for a year of travel, beginning with New York and Boston, and tthen going across Canada and down to San Francisco. He next sailed to Hawaii, and after short visits to Samoa, Fiji, and New Zealand he stayed for some months in Tahiti, from which he sent home several poems for publication in New Numbers, a quarterly in which he joined forces with Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater, and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. These poems show how willingly and completely he had yielded himself to the spirit of the island life.

In June 1914 he came home across America, intending to settle down at Cambridge.

War and death

Grave of Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), Skyros, Greece, in 2005. Photo by Han Borg. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The War came in August, and Brooke has left a record of his feelings on hearing the news, when ‘as he thought “England and Germany’’, the word “England” seemed to flash like a line of foam’.

In September he was given a commission in the Royal Naval Division, and he took part in the Antwerp expedition in October. ‘Apart from the tragedy’, he wrote, ‘I’ve never felt happier or better in my life than in those days in Belgium. And now I’ve the feeling of anger at a seen wrong to make me happier and more resolved in my work.’

After Antwerp the division went to Blandford for training, and about Christmas he wrote the 5 war-sonnets which appeared in the last issue of New Numbers, and quickly became known.

On 28 February 1915 the division sailed for the Dardanelles and spent some time ‘drifting about’, as he said, ‘like a bottle in some corner of the bay at a seaside resort’. Sir Ian Hamilton at Port Said offered Brooke a post on his staff, but he preferred to stay with his platoon.

Soon after this he was attacked by blood-poisoning, which his constitution, weakened by a sunstroke, was unable to resist; and after 2 days’ illness he died and was buried at Scyros on 23 April. The site was chosen by his close friend, William Denis Browne, who wrote of Brooke's death:

...I sat with Rupert. At 4 o'clock he became weaker, and at 4.46 he died, with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea-breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.

Brooke was unmarried. He had left directions that the profits of his writings were to be divided among 3 of his brother poets. ‘If I can set them free to any extent’, he said, ‘to write the poetry and plays and books they want to, my death will be more gain than loss.’

Writing

Besides the Poems of 1911 and the posthumous volume 1914, and other poems, there have been published Brooke’s fellowship dissertation, John Webster, a work of scholarship and insight, and the Letters from America which he wrote for the Westminster Gazette, and of which in especial the sections on Niagara and The Rockies show him as an accomplished writer of prose.

Mention must also be made of the fine quality of his familiar letters, many of which appear in the memoir prefixed to his Collected Poems (1916). But his main reputation will rest on the two small books of verse.

Of the pieces in Poems, many were written under the ‘ninetyish’ influence already mentioned, and were condemned by the author himself for ‘unimportant prettiness’; a few, which at the time attracted disproportionate attention, were studies in ugliness and the bravado of precocious disillusionment; but the best, such as Dining-room Tea and The Fish, had the qualities of ‘adventurousness, curiosity, and life-giving youthfulness’, of ‘sharpness and distinctness’ of vision, which led Walter de la Mare to class him as a poet of the intellectual imagination.

These qualities, together with a peculiar power of combining humor with poetic beauty and tenderness of feeling, as in The Old Vicarage and Tiare Tahiti, are still more marked in 1914. and other poems, which also showed ever-increasing technical ability, for instance in an easy mastery over the octosyllabic couplet, and in certain slight and subtle novelties in the construction of the sonnet. It remained for the few fragments written on the way to the Dardanelles to show that his instrument had fallen from his hands at the moment when he had brought it to perfection.

Critical introduction

by Sir Henry Newbolt

Few men are so obviously born to distinction as Rupert Brooke; he shone from first to last, and seldom disappointed expectation. He had no disadvantages to contend with; his athletic and intellectual gifts matched the beauty of his form and face; his whole personality was radiant. When his first volume of poems appeared it gained at once the recognition which his friends had anticipated: among the new constellation of the “Georgian Poets” he was instantly seen to be the brightest star. So much ardour and freshness put forth with such sureness of utterance, seemed to call only for enthusiasm. The volume was followed by a number of single poems, all beautiful and successful; then came the five sonnets on the War, a self-dedication and a forecast of a happy warrior’s death. Lastly, when that forecast had been fulfilled and deeply mourned, a final volume was received with an outpouring of affectionate admiration, such as has seldom been given to a young poet by his contemporaries. It was made clear that in a great moment, black with storm, his radiance had lightened the eyes of his countrymen.

It has been questioned whether such a reputation, won, as it were, by surprise, and confirmed in the emotion of a national crisis, is likely to stand the test of time. Time will show; but it may be noted that Brooke’s work is remarkable for originality and sanity, 2 qualities which in combination have always made for permanence. His artistic method was adapted rather than invented, but was none the less original. It would hardly be conceivable that a poet of his temperament should spend patience in elaborating a new instrument; he took up the old, with confidence that whoever had tried the strings before him, a new and living hand would bring new and living tones from them. So with the content of his poetry: his subjects were for the most part Love and Death, and he had no fear of coming to them in too late a day, for what he had to record was his own experience, and that he knew must be unique. He speaks of Beauty, but not, as some have done, of the search for it: for him expression was the peremptory need, and Beauty a matter of vision. How intense, and how original in its intensity, was his vision of things in themselves commonplace, may be most easily proved by The Fish, a poem in which he has almost endowed humanity with a new and non-human rapture of sensation. Again, in Dining-room Tea he has taken an ordinary domestic interior and has arrested, in a familiar moment, the kinematograph of eye and brain by which existence is displayed to us as an unending, unseverable tissue of changing action. So much a painter might have done; but the poet has done more—he has thrown over the picture the light of vision, the light, invisible to others, of the eternal reality lying behind the appearances of transitory life.

In his love poems, which form the greater part of his work, the same intensity is felt: it enters into every one of many moods, some of them the contradictory opposite of each other. Brooke was not perhaps much more inconsistent in his philosophy than other men, but he had this peculiarity, that he cared little for the construction of a watertight theory of life, and was too honest, or too detached, to take any account of his own inconsistencies. He alternated between moods, and set them all down with perfect sincerity, notwithstanding that some of them were moods of belief. In the mood of Tiare Tahiti he mocks gently at immortality; in The Hill, Second Best, and Mutability he is splendidly or sadly convinced that it is a vain hope. But in The Great Lover he cries, “Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,” and in The Soldier he bids his friends think of his heart as a pulse in the Eternal Mind, giving back, no less, the thoughts by England given.

As with the survival of the soul, so with the survival of love: he was alternately a passionate believer and a bitter sceptic. In Dust, in The Wayfarers, in the sonnet Not with vain tears, his hope has an ardent certainly which might well carry a world upon its wings; while in Kindliness, in Thoughts on the Shape of the Human Body, in the sonnet Love is a Breach in the Walls, he proclaims the opposite conviction: love, that was sweet lies at most, grows false and dull, “and all love is but this.” It must be so, for man’s very nature is a deformity in the world of ideal love.

There are poems more merciless even than these: "Dead Men’s Love", for example, and "Town and Country" and "Libido"; but bitter as he can be, Brooke is not cynical. His contempt is always for a lower as compared with a possible higher: the observation is amazingly faithful, the resulting expression never affected or rhetorical or merely rhapsodic. It is the simple truth that at one time he burns with one feeling, at another time with another: there is no attempt at synthesis, and no reticence: the ardour is breathed out, the doubts cried aloud, just as they came to him. A study of the dates of the poems named will show that they record not a gradual development, but an alternating series of moods equally natural, called forth no doubt by deeply-felt changes of circumstance. The collector of poetical gems will reject the records of pain and despair; the moralist will perhaps disapprove a story which has little to say of prudence or restraint, but tells of experience accepted freely and at a stage when it must inevitably be followed by regret.

Yet of Brooke, as of others, it is true that the poet is greater than any of his poems, his story more significant than any of its pages. These 2 little volumes are not a pocket of unequal gems nor the indiscreet revelation of a too-young lover’s secrets, they are fragmentary passages from a spiritual drama. How profoundly felt and how movingly uttered may be judged by anyone who will read the sonnet called "Waikiki" — the cry of one haunted by remembrance in the Circean Islands of the Pacific. Dramatically too came war to cut the tangled threads: but it was a joyful deliverance only because it gave opportunity to another energy of this glowing spirit.

Though utterly careless, it would seem, of personal salvation, he had a sane and virile love of righteousness for its own sake, and with this a natural desire to be freed and perfected. He had also the Englishman’s normal love of his own country, a love untroubled by political theories or conscientious objections because it knows how to judge of nations and their dreams. In the last poems of this soldier, England is not a world power nor even a vision of unbuilt hopes, but a land of kindly life and kindly memories. If these are set for a moment over against the deeds and dreams of our enemies, it will be understood how truly Rupert Brooke spoke for his generation when he offered his life for the beauty and the fellowship from which he knew he had received it.

Recognition

On 11 November 1985, Brooke was among 16 First World War poets commemorated on a slate monument unveiled in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow war poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

In popular culture

Statue of Brooke, Rugby, England. Photo by G-Man, 2005. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

• This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, opens with the quotation "Well this side of Paradise!… There's little comfort in the wise. — Rupert Brooke"
• Brooke was an inspiration to poet John Gillespie Magee, Jr., author of the poem "High Flight". Magee idolised Brooke and wrote a poem about him ("Sonnet to Rupert Brooke"). Magee also won the same poetry prize at Rugby School that Brooke had won 34 years previously.
• Travel writer Richard Halliburton (1900-1939) gathered material, including an interview with Brooke's mother, for an eventual biography of Brooke, but completion of the task fell to Arthur Springer whose Red Wine of Youth: A Life of Rupert Brooke, benefitting from Halliburton's researches, appeared in 1952. According to Gerry Max, Horizon Chasers: The Lives and Adventures of Richard Halliburton and Paul Mooney, Halliburton's message, to seek your destiny abroad and to embrace romantic enterprises, drew its chief inspiration, as did the new cult of youth emerging after World War I, from poet Brooke. "He died in a foreign land, young and full of promise; his life was the stuff from which beautiful dreams are made." Max notes that Brooke was himself a most accomplished travel writer, bringing to life, with an original cast of mind, all the places he visited, as his Letters From America fully demonstrates.
• Brooke's poem "A Channel Passage", with its vivid description of seasickness, is used for comic effect in a 3rd-season episode, "Springtime", of the television series M*A*S*H. Corporal Radar O'Reilly reads the poem to a nurse he hopes to impress, with surprising results. Radar pronounces the poet's name as "Ruptured Brooke".
• Part of Brooke's poem "Dust" is used as the lyric for a song by the same title, composed by Danny Kirwan and recorded by Fleetwood Mac on their 1972 album Bare Trees. Brooke is not credited on the album.
• On Pink Floyd's war-themed album The Final Cut, the song "The Gunner's Dream" contains the lyrics "in the space between the heavens and the corner of some foreign field."
• Portions of Brooke's poem "The Hill" appear at the beginning of the video for the Pet Shop Boys song "Se a vida (That's the way life is)".
• Brooke's poetry is used as character and plot device in the 1981 movie Making Love and the child ultimately born to the character Claire Elliott, played by Kate Jackson, is named after him.
• Jill Dawson's 2009 novel, The Great Lover, is based on the life of Rupert Brooke but mixes fact with fiction. The title is taken from one of Brooke's poems of the same name.

Publications

Poetry

• The Bastille: A prize poem. Rugby, UK: A.J. Lawrence, 1905.
• Poems. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1911.
• New Numbers (by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, & John Drinkwater). Ryton, Dymock, Gloucester, UK: Crypt House Press, 1914.
• 1914, and other poems. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1915.
• Collected Poems (includes Poems and Nineteen Fourteen, and other poems) (introduction by George Edward Woodberry). John Lane, 1915;
  • (edited and with a memoir by Edward Marsh). London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1918; revised edition, 1942.
• Selected Poems. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1917.
• The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke (edited by Geoffrey Keynes). London: Faber, 1946; 2nd edition, 1970.
• Four Poems. London: Scolar Press, 1974.
• The Irregular Verses (arranged with commentary by Peter Miller). Lechlade, Gloucestershire, UK: Green Branch, 1997.

Play

• Lithuania: A drama in one act. Chicago Little Theatre, 1915.

Non-fiction

• Letters From America (essays fpublished in Westminster Gazette and New Statesman; with preface by Henry James). Scribner, 1916.
• John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama (thesis). London: John Lane, 1916.
• Democracy and the Arts. Hart-Davis, 1946.
• The Prose of Rupert Brooke (edited & introduced by Christopher Hassall). London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1956.

Collected editions

• Rupert Brooke: A reappraisal and selection from his writings, some hitherto unpublished (edited by Timothy Rogers). Barnes & Noble, 1971.

Edited

• Georgian Poetry, 1911-1912 (edited with Edward Marsh). London: Poetry Bookshop, 1912.

Letters

• Letters (edited by Geoffrey Keynes). Harcourt, 1968.
• Letters to His Publisher, 1911-1914. Octagon Books, 1975.
• Rupert Brooke in Canada (edited by Sandra Martin & Roger Hall). Toronto: PMA Books, c. 1978.
• Song of Love: The letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier, 1909-1915 (edited by Pippa Harris). New York: Crown, 1991.
• Rupert Brooke and James Strachey: The hidden correspondence, 1905-1915 (edited by Keith Hale). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Poems by Rupert Brooke

The Soldier By Rupert Brooke

The Dead -- By Rupert Brooke Poem animation

The Call (Rupert Brooke)

Peace by Rupert Brooke

"When Love Has Changed to kindliness" By Rupert Brooke Poem animation

1. The Soldier

See also

• The Dymock poets
• The Georgian poets
• English World War I poets
• List of British poets

References

• Brooke, Rupert, Letters From America with a Preface by Henry James (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd, 1931; repr. 1947).
• Paul Delany. "The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and love in the Rupert Brooke circle" (Macmillan 1987)
• Keith Hale,ed. Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke-James Strachey, 1905-1914.
• Christopher Hassall. "Rupert Brooke: A biography" (Faber and Faber 1964)
• Nigel Jones. "Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and myth" (Metro Books,1999)
• Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. "The Letters of Rupert Brooke" (Faber and Faber 1968)
• John Lehmann. "Rupert Brooke: His life and his legend". Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1980.
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Dictionary of National Biography, 3rd supplement​ (edited by H.W.C. Davis & J.R.H. Weaver). London: Smith, Elder, 1927. Original article is at:. Web, Oct. 26, 2024.
• Gerry Max, Horizon Chasers - The Lives and Adventures of Richard Halliburton and Paul Mooney (McFarland, c2007). References are made to Brooke throughout.
• Gerry Max, "'When Youth Kept Open House' - Richard Halliburton and Thomas Wolfe," North Carolina Literary Review, 1996, Issue Number 5. (2 early 20th Century writers and their debt to the poet)
• Christopher Morley, "Rupert Brooke," in Shandygaff - A number of most agreeable Inquirendoes upon Life & Letters, interspersed with Short Stories & Skits, the Whole Most Diverting to the Reader (New York: Garden City Publishing Company, 1918), pp. 58-71. An important early reminiscence and appriaisal by famed essayist and novelist Morley.
• Mike Read. "Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke" (Mainstream Publishing Company Ltd 1997)
• Timothy Rogers. "Rupert Brooke: A reappraisal and selection" (Routledge, 1971)
• Arthur Springer. Red Wine of Youth - A Biography of Rupert Brooke (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952). Partly based on extensive correspondence between American travel writer Richard Halliburton and the literary and salon figures who had known Brooke.

External links

Poems

• "Retrospect" in The New Poetry: An anthology
• "1914" - Five sonnets by Brooke (I: Peace, II: Security, III: The Dead, IV: The Dead, V: The Soldier)
• Rupert Brooke profile and 4 poems at the Academy of American Poets
• Rupert Brooke at Lost Poets of the Great War (info & 5 poems)
• Rupert Brooke in Georgian Poetry 1913-15 (7 poems)
• Brooke, Rupert (1887-1915) (9 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
• Rupert Brooke 1887-1915 at the Poetry Foundation
• Brooke in The English Poets: An anthology: "Dust," "The Fish," "Dining-room Tea," "Tiare Tahiti," "The Great Lover," "Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research)," "Waikiki," "Beauty and Beauty," "The Dead," "The Soldier"
• Rupert Brooke at PoemHunter (118 poems)
• Rupert Brooke at Poetry Nook (122 poems)
• Poetry Archive: 136 poems of Rupert Brooke at Sanjeev.net
• The Poems of Rupert Brooke at the Rupert Brooke Society

Audio / video

• Rupert Brooke poems at YouTube

Books

• Bartleby.com - Collected Poems
• Works by Rupert Brooke at Project Gutenberg
• Rupert Brooke at Amazon.com

About

• Rupbert Brooke in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) at Friends of the Dymock Poets
• Rupert Brooke at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database
• Rupert Brooke at NNDB
• 12 September 1915, New York Times, A Genius Whom the War Made and Killed; Rupert Brooke's Death at the Front Illustrates the Paradox of the Effect on Literature of War, Which Ended His Career and Made Him Immortal, by Joyce Kilmer.
• Edward Winter, Rupert Brooke and Chess
• Rupert Brooke on Skyros
• Rupert Brooke Society
• Elizabeth Whitcomb Houghton Collection, containing letters by Brooke
• Lost Poets of the Great War, a hypertext document on the poetry of World War I by Harry Rusche, of the English Department, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. It contains a bibliography of related materials.
• Dymock Poets Archive University of Gloucestershire Archives and Special Collections

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Dictionary of National Biography, 3rd supplement​ (edited by H.W.C. Davis & J.R.H. Weaver). London: Smith, Elder, 1927. Original article is at: [Brooke, Rupert]