Rupert Brooke

Notable Works

• The Great Lover (1913)
• Nineteen Fourteen (1914)

About

Born and educated at Rugby School where his father was a house master, Brooke attended King’s College, Cambridge, where his friends included Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, W. B. Yeats, John Maynard Keynes and his brother Geoffrey (later Brooke’s bibliographer). Between graduation in 1909 and 1914 Brooke lived in Grantchester near Cambridge, where he enjoyed the countryside with friends as “Neo-Pagans” but also experienced an emotional crisis leading to a nervous breakdown in early 1912. He wrote no poetry during his rehabilitation but by summer had recovered enough to travel to Germany. One of his most popular poems, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”,  written in the Cafe des Westens in Berlin in May 1912, records this period

Like most men of his age and class, Brooke volunteered for service, joining the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve in Antwerp. His five war sonnets Nineteen Fourteen express the hopeful idealism with which Britain entered the war, imagining death as a noble sacrifice for his country: “If I should die, think only this of me, That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England.” In 1915, Brooke contracted blood poisoning from an insect bite and died on 23 April aboard a ship in the Aegean Sea and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros.  Winston Churchill praised him as, “All that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be, in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable.”

Legacy

His gift to the RLF from his literary estate helps support future generations of writers.