| 1905-1908 |
| 1908-1911 |
| 1914 |
| Experiments |
| Grantchester |
| Other Poems |
| The South Seas |
"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" ("The Soldier")
Rupert Brooke was educated at Rugby School where his father was a housemaster. He was popular, not least because of his good looks (he was "the most handsome man in England" according to WB Yeats) and charisma and after winning a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, he spent his time there establishing himself as a major figure on the literary scene. His friends included EM Forster, Virginia Woolf and the economist John Maynard Keynes (all members of the 'Bloomsbury Group') and in his short lifetime he won the respect and admiration as a poet of the highest order.
Brooke's early poetry is not that for which he is remembered, but is startling - particularly for those familiar with his war poems of 1914 - in its candour (see "Heaven"). He began writing poems in 1909 and his Poems 1911 and pieces written for the first two Georgian Poetry (1912) volumes organised by his friends EH Marsh and HE Monro (later attacked by radical poets Pound and Eliot but now well regarded).
After becoming a fellow of King's College in 1913, and writing a one act play - Lithuania - he had a breakdown and began travelling in America and Canada where he continued to write poetry that he would later declare a personal preference for. He enlisted in 1914 but actually saw very little action in the War. Poems like "The Soldier" saw Brooke become the patriotic poet of the early years of World War I for England, but he died in the Dardanelles of blood poisoning in 1915 before his verse could adapt to reflect the true horror of the war as later depicted by Sassoon and Owen. Despite the fame bestowed upon him at the time of his death due to the influence of his family and his friends, and his posthumously released 1914 and Other Poems (1915), his reputation is now based on the lighter verse and poems from his Pacific/ Tahiti period. His life sadly cut short, his work survives as only a fraction of what he might have achieved given time in his Collected Poems.
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