Rupert Brooke

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Rupert Brooke
Born	3 August 1887(1887-08-03) Rugby, Warwickshire, England
Died	23 April 1915 (aged 27) Aegean Sea, off the island of Skyros
Cause of death	Sepsis
Resting place	Skyros, Greece
Nationality	English
Education	Rugby School, King's College, University of Cambridge (fellow)
Occupation	Poet
Employer	Sidgwick and Jackson (Publisher)
Known for	Poetry

Rupert Chawner Brooke (middle name sometimes given as Chaucer)^[1] (3 August 1887 – 23 April 1915^[2]) 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".

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 English poet 1.2 Corner of a Foreign Field 1.3 In popular culture 2 References 3 Further reading 4 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] English poet

Brooke was born at 5 Hillmorton Road in Rugby, Warwickshire,^[3] 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.

He made friends among the Bloomsbury group of writers, some of whom admired his talent, while others were more impressed by his good looks. (Virginia Woolf boasted to Vita Sackville-West of once going skinny-dipping with Brooke in a moonlit pool when they were at Cambridge together.)^[4]

Brooke belonged to another literary group known as the Georgian Poets, and was one of 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 Jeffrey Archer).

Brooke suffered from a severe emotional crisis in 1913, some say^[who?] caused by sexual confusion and jealousy, resulting in the breakdown of his long relationship with Ka Cox (Katherine Laird Cox).^[5] Intrigue by both Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey is said^{[citation needed]} 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^[6]. 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.^[7] 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.

Brooke was an inspiration to poet John Gillespie Magee, Jr., author of the poem "High Flight." Magee idolized Brooke and wrote a poem about him ("Sonnet to Rupert Brook"). Magee also won the same Poetry Prize at Rugby School that Brooke had won 34 years prior.

[edit] Corner of a Foreign Field

His accomplished poetry gained many enthusiasts and followers and he was taken up by Edward Marsh, who brought him to the attention of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. He was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary Sub-Lieutenant^[8] shortly after his 27th birthday and took part in the Royal Naval Division's Antwerp expedition in October 1914. He sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915 but developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He died at 4.46 pm on 23 April 1915 in a French hospital ship moored in a bay off the island of Skyros in the Aegean on his way to a battle at Gallipoli. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, he was buried at 11 pm in an olive grove on Skyros, Greece.^[1][2][9] The site was chosen by his close friend, William Denis Browne, who wrote of Brooke's death:^[10]

“

...I sat with Rupert. At 4 o’clock he became weaker, and at 4.46 he died, with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea-breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.

”

His grave remains there today. On 11 November 1985, Brooke was among 16 First World War poets commemorated on a slate monument unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.^[11] The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow war poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."^[12]

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 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.^[13]

[edit] In popular culture

The beginning of This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald opens with the quote "... Well this side of Paradise!... There's little comfort in the wise. -Rupert Brooke" This Side of Paradise www.gutenberg.org from Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti final line. Brooke's poem "A Channel Passage," with its vivid description of seasickness, is used for comic effect in a third season episode, "Springtime," of the television series M*A*S*H. Corporal Radar O'Reilly reads the poem to a nurse he hopes to impress, with surprising results. Also, Radar pronounces the poet's name as "Ruptured Brooke." Part of Brooke's poem "Dust" is used as the lyric for a song by the same title, composed by Danny Kirwan and recorded by Fleetwood Mac on their 1972 album Bare Trees. Brooke is not credited on the album. On Pink Floyd's war-themed album The Final Cut, the song titled "The Gunner's Dream" contains the lyrics "...in the space between the heavens and the Corner of Some Foreign Field." Portions of Brooke's poem "The Hill" appear at the beginning of the video for the Pet Shop Boys song "Se a vida é (That's the way life is)".

Brooke's poetry is used as character and plot device in the 1981 movie Making Love, and the child ultimately born to Kate Jackson's character "Claire" is named after him.

[edit] References

Many of Rupert Brooke's poems and letters are cited in Jill Dawson's novel The Great Lover - Brooke's poem of the same name is also reproduced in full at the end of the novel.

[edit] 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.

• Christopher Hassall. "Rupert Brooke: A Biography" (Faber and Faber 1964)

• Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. "The Letters of Rupert Brooke" (Faber and Faber 1968)

• Colin Wilson. "Poetry & Mysticism" (City Lights Books 1969). Contains a chapter about Rupert Brooke.

• John Lehmann. "Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend" (George Weidenfield and Nicolson Ltd 1980)

• Mike Read. "Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke" (Mainstream Publishing Company Ltd 1997)

• Nigel Jones. "Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth" (Metro Books,1999)

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Rupert Brooke

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Rupert Brooke

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Rupert Brooke

• Rupert Brooke Society
• Rupert Brooke on Skyros
• Works by Rupert Brooke at Project Gutenberg
• Poetry Archive: 150 poems of Rupert Brooke
• Bartleby.com - Collected Poems
• Rupert Brooke at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission database
• Elizabeth Whitcomb Houghton Collection, containing letters by Brooke
• 12 September 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.
• Edward Winter, Rupert Brooke and Chess
• Dymock Poets Archive University of Gloucestershire Archives and Special Collections