Promising English poet who died in World War I at the age of twenty-seven. Rupert Brooke's best-known work is the sonnet sequence 1914 and Other Poems (1915), containing the famous 'The Soldier.' It promoted him as a heroic symbol of the first phase of the war. When the public began to learn more and more about the truth of the trenches, Brooke's idealistic rhetoric made him appear naive and foolish.

If I should die, think only this of me:
   That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
   In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
   Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
   Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
('The Soldier,' in 1914 and Other Poems by Rupert Brooke, London: Sidgwick & Jackson Limited, 1915, p. 15)

Rupert Brooke was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, the third child of William Parker Brooke and Ruth Mary Brooke (née Cotterill). He was named "Rupert" after his great-grandfather. Brooke's father taught classics and was a housemaster at Rugby School. From him the poet inherited his blue eyes.

In his childhood Brooke immersed himself in English poetry and twice won the school poetry prize. While at King's college, Cambridge, he became friends with G.E. Moore, Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, and Leonard Fry, members of the future Bloomsbury Group. James Strachey, younger brother of Lytton, fell in love with him. "This afternoon, he reported to Lytton, for the first time in my life, I saw Rupert naked. Can't we imagine what you'ld say on such an occasion? . . . But I'm simply inadequate of course. So I say nothing, except that I didn't have an erection – which was fortunate?, as I was naked too." (Fatal Glamour: the Life of Rupert Brooke by Paul Delany, Montreal, QC & Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015, p. 72)

Brooke's father died suddenly in 1910. For a short time he was in Rugby a deputy housemaster and thereafter he lived on an allowance from his mother. In 1911 Brooke worked on a thesis on the playwright John Webster and the Elizabethan drama, and travelled in Germany and Italy. On the contemporary literary scene he was know as a leader of a group of young "Neo-pagans", who slept outdoors, embraced a religion of nature, sunbathed and swam naked – Virginia Woolf joined the swimmers in Grantchester. W.B. Yeats called Brooke "the handsomest man in England."

But sex was something that was not part of the fun – "We don't copulate without marriage, but we do meet in cafes, talk on buses, go on unchaperoned walks, stay with each other, give each other books, without marriage," Brooke once told to his friend. Virginia Woolf wrote later in Times Literary Supplement (8 August 1918): "He was the type of English young manhood at its healthiest and most vigorous . . You might judge him extreme, and from the pinnacle of superior age assure him that the return to Nature was as sophisticated as any other pose, but you could not doubt that, whatever he might do, he was an originator, one of those leaders who spring up from time to time and show their power most clearly in subjugating their own generation." (quoted in The Generation of 1914 by Robert Wohl, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979, p. 87)

Poems, Brooke's first collection of verse, came out in 1911. His work was featured in the periodical Georgian Poetry, edited by his friend, Sir Edward Marsh. Over the next twenty years, the book sold almost 100 000 copies. Brooke assembled with others the hugely successful anthology Georgian Poetry: 1911-1912.

Georgians was a term generally applied to loosely linked poets, who tended to approach their subjects – often the nature or an everyday experience – with a direct, simple diction. Specifially the label refers to the poets included in the five volume anthology Georgian Poetry (1912-22). Clere Parsons (1908-31) rejected their work in 'A Plea for Better Criticism' as "the swan-song of Victorian poetry . . . From the Georgian attitude there followed a reaction to what may be termed 'intellectuosity' on the part of the more noticeable poets. This intellectuosity may indeed have its vices, but it is at least provocative of thought, and it has in consequence proved refreshing to readers weary of the Georgian milk-and-soda." (Oxford Poetry 1928, Edited With a Plea for Better Criticism by Clere Parsons, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1928, pp. v-vi) Critics near the Bloomsbury group accused the group of naivety; Brooke broke with Bloomsbury in 1912.

In 1911 Brooke was secretly engaged to Noel Olivier, five years his junior, the daughter of Sir Sydney Olivier. They had first met in 1908 at a Fabian Society dinner in Cambridge. The affair was for all participants frustrating and subsequently Brooke had an affair with the actress Cathleen Nesbitt. Overworked and emotionally empty, Brooke suffered a total physical and mental breakdown.

Brooke and Katharine Cox went to Germany In the spring of 1912. There he wrote 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester', one of his most admired poems. It has been assumed that Ka Cox bore Brooke's stillborn child. In England Brooke's thesis brought him a fellowship at King's College in 1913.

In the summer of 1912, Brooke met the artist Phyllis Gardner; their stormy and passionate relationship remained secret until 2000, when their correspondence was unearthed at the British Library. "He looked like a beautiful statue," she wrote after they had gone skinny dipping at Byron's Pool in Grantchester. "And I could keep away from him no longer." (Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth by Nigel Jones, London: Head of Zeus, 2015, p. 552) The hot summer day inspired Brooke's poem, 'Beauty and Beauty': "When Beauty and Beauty meet, / All naked, fair to fair, / The earth is crying-sweet, / And scattering-bright the air, / Eddying, dizzying round, / With soft and drunken laughter, / Veiling all that may befall, / After—after—" (The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, with an introduction by George Edward Woodberry, and a biographical note by Margaret Lavington, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, MCMXXXI, p. 151) Gardner never married.  She became the leading authority and breeder of Irish wolfhounds and published a history of these gigantic dogs in 1931.

Between the years 1913 and 1914 Brooke spent wandering in North America and the South Seas, and depicted the impressions in his Letters fron America (1916). Henry James's introduction to it was completely slashed by A.C. Benson: "After all H.J.'s pontification, dim with incense-smoke, stately, mysterious, R.B.'s robust letters are almost a shock. It is as if one went up to receive a sacrament in a great dark church, and were greeted by shouts of laughter and a shower of chocolate creams." (quoted in 'Henry James and the Universities' by Jean Gooder, Literary Imagination, Vol. 15, Issue 1, March 2013, p. 8) Brooke spent three months on Tahiti, wrote some of his finest poems, and got a coral poisoning into his legs. Moreover, he had an affair with a woman called Taatamata, commemorated in 'Tiare Tahiti'. They had a daughter, born just a few months before Brooke's death. 

The outbreak of World War I interrupted Brooke's career as a writer. He was commissioned in Churchill's Royal Navy Division, and joined the Dardanelles expedition. Brooke did not see any action. He died of septicemia as a result of being bitten by a virulent mosquito in Cairo or at the Pyramids – or according to some sources of food poisoning – on a hospital ship off Scyros on April 23, 1915. Early reports claimed he had died of sunstroke, not far from Troy. Brooke was buried on the island. Henry James mourned Brooke's early death.

The poet's legend was further solidified by Winston Churchill's obituary text in The Times. "Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely offered." (quoted in The Remembered Dead: Poetry, Memory and the First World War by Sally Minogue and Andrew Palmer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 30) It is possible that Edward Marsh, the First Lord's private secretary in the Home Office and the Admiralty, was the real author of the eulogy. Marsh was Brooke's patron and supporter and according to Henry James, "intimate and devoted friend." ('Feeling Modernist Patronage: Edward Marsh, Rupert Brooke, and Modernism's Intimate Ecologies' Jodie Medd, Modernism/modernity, Volume 29, Number 4, November 2022) Marsh's memoir of Brooke appeared in 1918.

Walter de la Mare, who was one of the three legatees of Brooke's literary estate (others were Lascelles Abercrombie and  Wilfrid Wilson Gibson), wrote that "no other English poet of his age has given up his life at a moment so signal, so pregnant. This has isolated and set Rupert Brooke apart." (Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination: A Lecture, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1919, p. 40) Brooke's friends and relatives kept his sexual affairs and dark side – misogynism, anti-Semitism, unstableness – hidden from the public. The poet's reputation began to wane after the acrid poems of Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), who was machine-gunned to death, and Siegfried Sassoon's visions of "the hell where youth and laugher go". In France as a by-product of the war, writers returning home from the trenches created such artistic and literary movements as Dada and Surrealism and in England T.S. Eliot expressed his feeling of meaningless in The Waste Land. Brooke's chivalry and naive patriotism was permanently outdated. He never lived to see the end of the war, and his poetic stature was frozen for a long period in such lines as "Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! / There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, / But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold." ('The Dead,' in 1914 and Other Poems, p. 13) Nowadays Brooke is chiefly valued for his lighter verse, the Tahiti poems, and for a few sonnets.

For further reading: Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen: Classical Connections by Lorna Hardwick, Stephen Harrison, Elizabeth Vandiver (2024); Rupert Brooke in the First World War by Alisa Miller (2017); Rupert Brooke: Poetry, Love and War by Henry Maas (2015); The Second I Saw You: The True Love Story of Rupert Brooke and Phyllis Gardner by Lorna C. Beckett (2015); Fatal Glamour: The Life of Rupert Brooke by Paul Delany (2015); British Poets of the Great War: Brooke, Rosenberg, Thomas: A Documentary Volume, edited by Patrick Quinn (2000); Rupert Brooke: Life, Death & Myth by Nigel H. Jones (1999); Rupert Brooke by William E. Laskowski (1994); The Neo-Pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth by Paul Delany (1987); Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend by John Lehman (1980); Rupert Brooke: The Man and Poet by Robert Brainard Persall (1979); Rupert Brooke, Frances Cornford, Virginia Woolf: With a Note on the Manuscripts by Geoffrey Keynes (1978); Rubert Brooke: A Biography by Christopher Vernon Hassall (1964); A Bibliography of the Works of Rupert Brooke by Geoffrey Keynes (1959); Red Wine of Youth: A Life of Rupert Brooke by Arthur Stringer (1948); Memories and Friends by A.C. Benson (1924); Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination by Walter de la Mare (1919); Rupert Brooke: A Memoir by Edward Marsh (1918)

Selected works:

• The Pyramids, 1904
• The Bastille, 1905
• Puritanism in the Early English Drama, 1910
• Poems, 1911
• The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, 1912
• The Authorship of the Latter Apius and Virginia, 1913
• 1914 and Other Poems, 1915 (includes 'The Soldier')
• The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, 1915 (with an introduction by George Edward Woodberry and a biographical note by Margaret Lavington)
  
• John Webster And The Elizabethan Drama , 1915
• Lithuania: A Drama in One Act, 1915
• Letters from America, 1916 (with a preface by Henry James)
• Selected Poems, 1917
• The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, 1918
• Lithuania, 1922
• A Letter to the Editor of the Poetry Review, 1929
• Complete Poems, 1932
• Twenty Poems, 1935
• The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke, 1946 (edited by Geoffrey Keynes)
• Democracy and the Arts, 1946 (with a preface by Geoffrey Keynes)
  
• The Poetical Works, 1949
• Poems of Rupert Brooke, 1952
• The Prose of Rupert Brooke, 1956 (ed. by G. Hassall)
• The Letters of Rupert Brooke, 1968 (chosen and edited by Geoffrey Keynes)
• Rupert Brooke: A Reappraisal and Selection From His Writings, Some Hitherto Unpublished, 1971 (edited by Timothy Rogers)
• Letters from Rupert Brooke to His Publisher, 1911-1914, 1975
• Rupert Brooke in Canada, 1978 (edited Sandra Martin and Roger Hall)
• The Poems of Rupert Brooke, 1987
• Song of Love: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier, 1991 (edited by Pippa Harris) 
• If I Should Die, 1996
• The Irregular Verses of Rupert Brooke, 1997 (arranged with commentary by Peter Miller) 
• Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914, 1998 (edited by Keith Hale)
• Two Plays, 1999
• Rupert Brooke & Wilfred Owen, 2002 (selected by George Walter)
  
• Letters from America: Travels in the USA and Canada, 2007 (foreword by Benjamin Markovits; afterword by Henry James)
  
• The Poems of Rupert Brooke, 2020 (Dover edition; complete oeuvre)