Rupert C. Brooke
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Rupert Chawner Brooke was born on 3rd August 1887 in Rugby. He was the third of four children born to William Parker Brooke and Ruth Mary (née Cotterill): Richard England (born 1881), Edith Marjorie (1885), and William Alfred Cotterill (1891). He attended Rugby School, where his father was a housemaster and where Rupert first began to write poetry. Rupert then studied at King’s College, Cambridge, initially Classics and later English Literature. He was awarded a fellowship in recognition of his work on John Webster. During this period, he became interested in socialism and was President of the University Fabian Society. While at Cambridge, he continued to write poetry, dwelling on themes of love and nature. By this time, he was considered a serious, though still unaccomplished, poet. At Cambridge and in the years immediately following, Rupert moved within an influential literary and intellectual circle and became associated with the Georgian poets, a loose group whose work favoured lyricism, natural imagery, and traditional forms in reaction against Victorian excess. His contemporaries included figures connected to the Bloomsbury milieu, and Brooke’s reputation within these circles grew rapidly, aided by both his verse and his striking personal presence. |
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Between graduating and the start of the war, Rupert spent most of his time writing and travelling. His poetry during this period was similar in nature to that of most poets of his generation. It was also during this time that he was described as “strikingly good-looking, the handsomest young man in England” by W. B. Yeats. Confusion about his homosexual impulses, together with frustration caused by the rejection of the actress Cathleen Nesbitt, with whom he was in love, culminated in Rupert suffering a nervous breakdown in early 1912. As a result, he spent several months in rehabilitation, during which time he was not allowed to write poetry. Following his rehabilitation, he travelled extensively in North America and the Pacific. Settling for a time in Tahiti, he wrote a number of striking poems and is believed to have fathered a child with his Tahitian lover before returning to England in the spring of 1914. Rupert was a protégé of Eddie Marsh, Private Secretary to Winston Churchill, and when he volunteered for active service at the outbreak of war, Marsh helped him gain a commission in the Royal Naval Division. He served as a Sub-Lieutenant with the Anson Battalion at Antwerp. | ||||||||||||||||||
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In the period between returning from Antwerp and embarking for Gallipoli, Rupert produced his best-known poetry: a group of five war sonnets titled Nineteen Fourteen. These sonnets express the hopeful idealism and enthusiasm with which Britain entered the war. They were published posthumously in May 1915. In November 1914, he was first transferred to Nelson and then, less than one week later, to Hood. While the Naval Brigades were stationed in Egypt, Rupert had been feeling generally unwell for several weeks, suffering from sunstroke and dysentery. Around 10th April, while at anchor off the Greek island of Skyros, he developed a sore on his upper lip, believed to have arisen from a mosquito bite sustained whilst in Port Said. On the 20th, his condition worsened significantly, and the affected area became severely inflamed. A bacteriologist aboard the ship identified the problem as a diplococcal infection. French surgeons performed two operations to drain the abscess, and he was moved to the French hospital ship Duguay-Trouin on the 22nd. Rupert’s service record states that on the 23rd April he died from pneumococcal septicaemia. Denis Browne wrote:
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Denis Browne chose the site of Rupert’s grave on Skyros, and he was buried on 24th April in an isolated olive grove close to Tribouki Bay by Chaplain B. J. Failes. The funeral party included Arthur Asquith, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, and Bernard Freyberg. Rupert’s death was widely mourned at home. Among those who praised him after his death were Virginia Woolf and Henry James. Winston Churchill wrote a tribute in The Times:
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An extract from Rupert's service record:
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For decades, Rupert Brooke’s war poetry was dismissed as sentimental and overly idealistic. More recently, however, critics have argued that his work is valuable for the insight it offers into English attitudes during the pre-war period and the early years of the conflict. Paul O’Prey wrote: “His five sonnets of 1914, which are not representative of his other work, captured the mood of a particular moment, and no doubt he would have written differently had he survived to see how the war progressed and attitudes changed.” The opening lines of The Soldier remain, in the opinion of this website, the most widely remembered of all First World War poetry: | |||||||||||||||||||
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