Poet, born in Rugby, Warwickshire, C England, UK. He studied at Cambridge, travelled in Germany, and visited the USA and Tahiti. He died a commissioned officer on Skyros on his way to the Dardanelles, and was buried there. His Poems appeared in 1911, and 1914 and Other Poems in 1915, after his death. His handsome appearance and untimely death made him a favourite poet among young people in the interwar period.
Rupert Chawner Brooke (August 3, 1887 – April 23, 1915) was a British poet known for his idealistic War Sonnets written during the First World War (especially The Soldier), as well as for his poetry written outside of war, especially The Old Vicarage, Grantchester and The Great Lover.
Biography
Brooke was born at 5 Hillmorton Road in Rugby, Warwickshire, England, the son of a William Parker Brooke, a Rugby schoolmaster and Ruth Mary Brooke née Cotterill. Brooke made friends among the Bloomsbury group of writers, some of whom admired his talent, while others, both male and female, were more impressed by his good looks. Brooke belonged to another literary group known as the Georgian Poets, and was the most important of the Dymock poets, associated with the Gloucestershire village of Dymock, where he spent some time before the war.
Brooke toured the United States and Canada to write travel diaries for the Westminster Gazette and visited several islands in the South Seas. Brooke was once engaged to Noel Olivier, whom he met while she was a 15-year-old at the progressive Bedales School. His attraction to members of his own sex was something he wrote about often - notably, a descriptive (if self-centered) account of his losing his virginity to another boy, his suggestion that a school-master "delights to nip in the bud almost wisely, for all other boys are beasts," and his many accounts of being desired and desiring other boys, especially one whom he referred to as "one with the form of a Greek God." However, unable to feel either truly homosexual or heterosexual, and without the label of "bisexual" in social use, Brooke often became angry with himself and his lovers. "Henry James met Rupert Brooke in Cambridge in 1909, when Brooke acknowledged 'I pulled my fresh, boyish stunt' and bewitched the novelist".
His accomplished poetry gained many enthusiasts and followers and he was taken up by Edward Marsh, who brought him to the attention of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty.
As a side-note, Rupert Brooke's brother, 2nd Lt. William Alfred Cotterill Brooke was a member of the 8th Battalion London Regiment (Post Office Rifles) and was killed in action near Le Rutoire Farm on the historic Loos battlefield on June 14, 1915, aged 24.
Discussion
Brooke's poetry gives us a glimpse of a golden era in England just before the First World War.
His early poetry was classically inspired, with death as its most frequent theme throughout. Amongst his works were five War Sonnets, a sixth sonnet – The Treasure – and The Old Vicarage, Grantchester. Winston Churchill wrote his obituary in The Times of April 26, 1915, saying "he advanced to the brink ... with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country's cause", and Lascelles Abercrombie wrote one for The Morning Post. Brooke's friends complained that the heroic myth of Brooke's patriotic self-sacrifice was deliberately exaggerated to encourage more young men to enlist. Since Brooke's death, the name Rupert has been used as a term of mockery for any young Army officer with a public school education. The patriotic poems of Brooke are often compared to the anti-war poems of Siegfried Sassoon who, ironically, spent the majority of the war in active service, yet survived. Jackson (London) 1911 Georgian Poetry, 1911-1912, 1912 (co-compiler with Edward Marsh) Lithuania: A Drama in One Act 1915 1914 &
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