Rupert Chawner Brooke (middle name sometimes given as Chaucer)^[1] (August 3, 1887–April 23, 1915) was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War (especially The Soldier); however, he never experienced combat at first hand. He was also known for his boyish good looks, which prompted the Irish poet William Butler Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England".

Biography

Georgian poet

Brooke was born at 5 Hillmorton Road in Rugby, Warwickshire^[2], the second of the three sons of William Parker Brooke, a Rugby schoolmaster, and Ruth Mary Brooke, née Cotterill. He attended Hillbrow Prep School before being educated at Rugby School. While travelling in Europe, he prepared a thesis entitled "John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama", which won him a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where he became a member of the Cambridge Apostles, helped found the Marlowe Society drama club and acted in plays including the Cambridge Greek Play. Brooke made friends among the Bloomsbury group of writers, some of whom admired his talent, while others 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. He also lived in the Old Vicarage, Grantchester (a house now occupied by Cambridge chemist Mary Archer and her husband, the novelist and felon Jeffrey Archer).

Brooke suffered from a severe emotional crisis in 1913, some say caused by sexual confusion and jealousy, resulting in the breakdown of his long relationship with Ka Cox (Katherine Laird Cox).^[3] Intrigue by both Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey is said to have played a part in Brooke's nervous collapse and subsequent rehabilitation trips to Germany.

As part of his recuperation Brooke toured the United States and Canada to write travel diaries for the Westminster Gazette. He took the long way home, sailing across the Pacific and staying some months in the South Seas. Much later it was revealed that he may have fathered a daughter with a Tahitian woman (Taatamata) with whom he seems to have enjoyed his most complete emotional relationship. Brooke fell heavily in love several times, with men and women, although his bisexuality was edited out of his life by his first literary executor. Many more people were in love with him.^[4] Brooke was romantically involved with the actress Cathleen Nesbitt and was once engaged to Noel Olivier, whom he met while she was a 15-year-old at the progressive Bedales School.

Corner of a Foreign Field

A statue of Rupert Brooke in Rugby

Grave of Rupert Brooke on Skyros Island, Greece

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 14 June 1915, aged 24. He is buried in Fosse 7 Military Cemetery (Quality Street), Mazingarbe, Pas de Calais, France. He had only joined the battalion on 25 May http://www.1914-18.co.uk/brooke/brookes%20brother%20text.htm.

References

Further reading

Keith Hale,ed. Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke-James Strachey, 1905-1914.

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

• Rupert Brooke Society
• Poetry Archive: 150 poems of Rupert Brooke
• Rupert Brooke at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database
• Collected Poems by Rupert Brooke
• Elizabeth Whitcomb Houghton Collection, containing letters by Brooke
• September 12, 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
• 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.

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