Rupert
Brooke
born Aug. 3, 1887, Rugby, Warwickshire,
Eng.
died April 23, 1915, Skyros, Greece
English poet, a wellborn, gifted, handsome
youth whose early death in World War I
contributed to his idealized image in the
interwar period. His best-known work is the
sonnet sequence 1914.
At school at Rugby, where his father was
a master, Brooke distinguished himself as a
cricket and football (soccer) player as well
as a scholar. At King’s College, Cambridge,
where he matriculated in 1906, he was
prominent in the Fabian (Socialist) Society
and attracted innumerable friends. He
studied in Germany and traveled in Italy,
but his favourite pastime was rambling in
the countryside around the village of
Grantchester, which he celebrated in a
charming and wildly irrational panegyric,
“The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (1912). In
1911 his Poems were published. He spent a
year (1913–14) wandering in the United
States, Canada, and the South Seas. With the
outbreak of World War I, he received a
commission in the Royal Navy. After taking
part in a disastrous expedition to Antwerp
that ended in a harrowing retreat, he sailed
for the Dardanelles, which he never reached.
He died of septicemia on a hospital ship off
Skyros and was buried in an olive grove on
that island.
Brooke’s wartime sonnets, 1914 (1915),
brought him immediate fame. They express an
idealism in the face of death that is in
strong contrast to the later poetry of
trench warfare. One of his most popular
sonnets, “The Soldier,” begins with the
familiar lines:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign
field
That is for ever England.
