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Rupert Chawner Brooke (3 August 1887 – 23 April 1915The date of Brooke's death and burial under the Julian calendar that applied in Greece at the time was 10 April. The Julian calendar was 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar.) was an English poet known for his idealistic war written during the First World War, especially "The Soldier". He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England". He died of septicaemia following a mosquito bite whilst aboard a French hospital ship moored off the island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea.
In October 1906, he went up to King's College, Cambridge, to study classics. There, he became a member of the Apostles, was elected as president of the university Fabian Society, helped found the Marlowe Society drama club and acted, including in the Cambridge Greek Play. The friendships he made at school and university set the course for his adult life, and many of the people he met—including George Mallory—fell under his spell.Davis, Wade (2011). Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest. Bodley Head. Virginia Woolf told Vita Sackville-West that she had gone skinny-dipping with Brooke in a moonlit pool when they were in Cambridge together.Vita Sackville-West letter to Harold Nicolson, 8 April 1941, reproduced in Nigel Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson: The War Years 1939–1945, Vol. II of Diaries and Letters, Atheneum, New York, 1967, p. 159. In 1907, his elder brother Dick died of pneumonia at age 26. Brooke planned to put his studies on hold to help his parents cope with the loss of his brother, but they insisted he return to university.
There is a blue plaque at The Orchard, Grantchester, where he lived and wrote. It reads: "Rupert Brooke Poet & Soldier 1887–1915 Lived and wrote at The Orchard 1909–1911, and at The Old Vicarage 1911–1912".
Brooke had his first Heterosexuality relationship with Élisabeth van Rysselberghe, daughter of painter Théo van Rysselberghe. They met in 1911 in Munich. His affair with Élisabeth came closest to be consummated than any other he ever had so far. It is possible that the two became lovers in a "complete sense" in May 1913 in Swanley. It was in Munich, where he had met Élisabeth, that a year later he finally succeeded in a sexual liaison with Katherine Laird Cox.
Brooke suffered a severe emotional crisis in 1912, resulting in the breakdown of his long relationship with Ka Cox. Brooke's paranoia that Lytton Strachey had schemed to destroy his relationship with Cox by encouraging her to see Henry Lamb precipitated his break with his Bloomsbury group friends and played a part in his nervous collapse and subsequent rehabilitation trips to Germany.Keith Hale, ed. Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke-James Strachey, 1905–1914.
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 named Taatamata with whom he seems to have enjoyed his most complete emotional relationship.Mike Read: Forever England (1997) Many more people were in love with him.Biography at GLBTQ encyclopaedia by Keith Hale, editor of Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke-James Strachey, 1905–1914 Brooke was romantically involved with the artist Phyllis Gardner and the actress Cathleen Nesbitt, and was once engaged to Noël Olivier, whom he met, when she was aged 15, at the progressive Bedales School.
Brooke's 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 joined the Royal Navy after the outbreak of war in August 1914, and was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary sub-lieutenant shortly after his 27th birthday. Brooke was assigned to the Royal Naval Division, an infantry division consisting of Royal Navy and Royal Marines personnel not needed at sea, and took part in the siege of Antwerp in early October.
Brooke came to public attention as a war poet early the following year, when The Times Literary Supplement published two sonnets ("IV: The Dead" and "V: The Soldier") on 11 March; the latter was then read from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday (4 April). His most famous collection of poetry, containing all five sonnets, 1914 & Other Poems, was first published in May 1915 and, in testament to his popularity, ran to 11 further impressions that year and by June 1918 had reached its 24th impression, 1914 & Other Poems by Rupert Brooke, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1918 (24th impression). a process undoubtedly fuelled through posthumous interest.
Another friend and war poet, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, assisted at his hurried funeral. His grave remains there still, with a monument erected by his friend Stanley Casson, poet and archaeologist, who, in 1921, published Rupert Brooke and Skyros, a "quiet essay", illustrated with woodcuts by Phyllis Gardner.
Brooke's surviving brother, William Alfred Cotterill Brooke, fell in action on the Western Front on 14 June 1915 as a subaltern with the 1/8th (City of London) of the London Regiment (Post Office Rifles), at the age of 24. He had been in France on active service for nineteen days before his death. His body was buried in Fosse 7 Military Cemetery (Quality Street), Mazingarbe.
In July 1917, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby was informed of the death in action of his son Michael Allenby, leading to Allenby's breakdown in tears in public while he recited a poem by Rupert Brooke.
His name is recorded on the village war memorial in Grantchester.
The wooden cross that marked Brooke's grave on Skyros, which was painted and carved with his name, was removed when a permanent memorial was made there. His mother, Mary Ruth Brooke, had the cross brought to Rugby, to the family plot at Clifton Road Cemetery. Because of erosion in the open air, it was removed from the cemetery in 2008 and replaced by a more permanent marker. The Skyros cross is now at Rugby School with the memorials of other Old Rugbeians.
The first stanza of "The Dead" is inscribed onto the base of the Royal Naval Division War Memorial in London.
The Cenotaph in Wellington, New Zealand, has the words from "The Dead", "These laid the world away; poured out the red/Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be/Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,/That men call age; and those who would have been,/Their sons, they gave, their immortality." inscribed on the pediment.
In 1988, the sculptor Ivor Roberts-Jones was commissioned to produce a statue of Brooke at Regent Place, a small triangular open space, in his birth town of Rugby, Warwickshire. The statue was unveiled by Mary Archer.
A 2006 portrait statue of Rupert Brooke in army uniform by Paul Day stands in the front garden of The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.
In 2023, artist Stephen Hopper painted a portrait in oils celebrating Brooke's life and featuring references to his grave on Skyros and his service with the Hood Battalion, part of the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division. (See detail on the pencil poised in his hand and the blank sheet of paper, symbolising work unfulfilled). ) at Royal Military College of Canada]]
American adventurer Richard Halliburton made preparations for writing a biography of Brooke but died before he could.
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Death
Brooke sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915, but developed severe gastroenteritis whilst stationed in Egypt followed by streptococcal sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. French surgeons carried out two operations to drain the abscess, but he died of septicaemia at 4:46 pm on 23 April 1915, on the French hospital ship , moored in a bay off the Greek island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea, while on his way to the landings at Gallipoli. He was 27 at the time of his death. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, Brooke was buried at 11 pm in an olive grove on Skyros. The site was chosen by his close friend, William Denis Browne, who wrote of Brooke's death:
Commemorations
On 11 November 1985, Brooke was among 16 First World War poets commemorated on a slate monument unveiled in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The inscription on the stone was taken from Wilfred Owen's "Preface" to his poems and reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
Legacy
Literary influences
In the afterword of his Collected Poems (1919), Lord Alfred Douglas wrote: "... never before in the history of English literature has poetry sunk so low. When a nation ... can seriously lash itself into enthusiasm over the puerile crudities (when they are nothing worse) of a Rupert Brooke, it simply means that poetry is despised and dishonoured and that sane criticism is dead or moribund."
(2025). 9781613731598, Chicago University. ISBN 9781613731598 Halliburton's notes were used by Arthur Springer to write Red Wine of Youth: A Biography of Rupert Brooke (1921). Richard Halliburton Papers: Correspondence , Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Accessed online 2 January 2008. Gerry Max, Horizon Chasers, p. 12 et passim. Also Jonathan Root, Halliburton--The Magnificent Myth, p. 70 et passim Brooke was an inspiration to Canadian fighter pilot John Gillespie Magee Jr., known for his poems "Sonnet to Rupert Brooke" (1938) and "High Flight" (1941). Brooke also appears as a minor character in A. S. Byatt's novel The Children's Book (2009).
Musical influences
Frederick Septimus Kelly wrote his "Elegy, In Memoriam Rupert Brooke for harp and strings" after attending Brooke's death and funeral. He also took Brooke's notebooks, containing important late poems, for safekeeping and later returned them to England. Brooke's poems have been set to music by groups and individuals including Charles Ives, Marjo Tal and Fleetwood Mac.
Quotes
Brooke's poems are quoted in F. Scott Fitzgerald's debut novel This Side of Paradise (1920), This Side of Paradise www.gutenberg.org from Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti final line. Princess Elizabeth's Act of Dedication speech (1947), TV series including M*A*S*H episode "Springtime" (1974) and the second episode of (2022), as well as in films including Making Love (1982).
See also
External links
Categories: 1887 Births, 1915 Deaths, 20th-century English Male Writers, 20th-century English Poets, Alumni Of King's College, Cambridge, Bisexual Male Writers, Bisexual Poets, Deaths From Sepsis, English Male Poets, English World War I Poets, Fellows Of King's College, Cambridge, Infectious Disease Deaths In Greece, English Lgbtq Poets, English Bisexual Writers, English Bisexual Men, Members Of The Fabian Society, People Educated At Rugby School, People From Grantchester, People From Rugby, Warwickshire, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve Personnel Of World War I, Royal Navy Officers Of World War I, Skyros, Sonneteers, War Writers, Deaths Due To Insect Bites And Stings, British Military Personnel Killed In World War I, Lost Generation Writers, Military Personnel From Warwickshire
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