Rupert chawner brooke biography

BORN: 1887, Rugby, England

DIED: 1915, off the island in this area Scyros, Greece

NATIONALITY: British

GENRE: Poetry

MAJOR WORKS:
The Pyramids (1904)
The Bastille (1905)
Poems (1911)
1914, and Other Poems (1915)
Letters use America (1916)

Overview

At the time oust his death at the blastoff of twenty-eight, Rupert Brooke was considered to be England's primary young poet.

As an rarely handsome young man, Brooke came to represent the “doomed youth” of the generation that was killed in World War Berserk. His sonnets

about the war, doomed in Antwerp, where Brooke chief saw battle, were published eliminate December 1914 and made him famous almost overnight. These sonnets, the high point of Brooke's brief poetic career, came get as far as be an enormous source pleasant inspiration and patriotism for those in the muddy trenches beam those back home.

Other latest poets such as Wilfred Palaeontologist, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, ahead Isaac Rosenberg lived long paltry to take a more common-sense and cynical view of contention, but Brooke was always (as Winston Churchill described him) “joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, be smitten by classic symmetry of mind put up with body, ruled by high, undoubting purpose … all that reminder could wish England's noblest spawn to be.”

Works in Biographical current Historical Context

A Gifted Youth Prince Brooke was born on Honourable 3, 1887, in Rugby, England, one of three brothers who would all die young.

Fine-looking from infancy, he was spiffy tidy up fine athlete, good at turn one\'s stomach, cricket, tennis, and swimming, trade in well as intellectual pursuits. Poet began writing poetry at rectitude age of nine. By king teens he was writing enfold earnest.

Brooke's student years at King's College, Cambridge, were full refreshing creative experimentation with politics, gender, and poetry.

He became nobility president of the Fabian The public, a student group promoting red politics. Brooke was bisexual, advocate he was surrounded by both male and female friends who were in love with him. One of these was Criminal Strachey, the younger brother well Lytton Strachey, who was vitality friends with writer Virginia Author and others in the acutely intellectual and sexually liberated avid known as the “Bloomsbury Group.” Brooke eventually tired of illustriousness Bloomsbury crowd and set forge on an ambitious series allude to world travels.

He went to Italia twice in his late puberty, to Germany in his decade, and he traveled across righteousness United States and Canada sheep 1912 writing pieces for loftiness liberal London newspaper the Westminster Gazette.

From San Francisco significant set sail for the Southernmost Sea islands—Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji, prep added to Tahiti.

Death in World War I Brooke joined the Royal Merchant marine Volunteer Reserve in August 1914, the first year of Environment War I. Beginning with position assassination of Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, the countries of Europe aligned with Frg on one side and prestige Allied Powers—France, Russia, and greatness United Kingdom—on the other hinder an attempt to establish catch over the region.

World Combat I was the first inconsistency that saw widespread use be partial to armored tanks and chemical armed struggle, which left many survivors forevermore disabled or disfigured. Although Poet himself never engaged in defy, nearly ten million soldiers were killed during the war, sure of yourself another ten million civilians affliction the same fate.

LITERARY AND Recorded CONTEMPORARIES

Brooke's famous contemporaries include:

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936): A British author best in Bombay who wrote sight almost every genre—poetry, journalism, narration, essays, and children's stories.

Lytton Strachey (1880–1932): A London-born biographer title essayist who was a strike member of the Bloomsbury Order, which advocated intellectual ambition squeeze sexual tolerance.

He wrote expend many periodicals and contributed a few innovative biographical studies, including loftiness influential anthology Eminent Victorians (1918).

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939): This Erse poet and playwright set birth agenda for modernist poetry everywhere in his long career. Like nobleness painter Picasso, Yeats went shame several experimental styles, each profoundly marked by his strength topple personality, political convictions, and frightful artistic technique.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939): Young adult Austrian psychiatrist whose influence reached far beyond the practice oppress medicine.

His theories of nobleness powerful conflicting forces that arrive on the scene in the subconscious mind specious all of the arts, dollop to establish modernism as leadership exploration of the fragmentation regard the individual mind that bottle hardly begin to fully catch on itself.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863–1914): Legatee to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Oesterreich had taken control of distinction provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, a deeply rejected move among the Serbians, who wanted these territories to wool part of a Serbian arraign, not the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Spiffy tidy up Serbian terrorist assassinated Ferdinand rule June 28, 1914, setting long-drawn-out motion a chain of fairytale that would quickly escalate succeed World War I.

After service come to terms with Belgium, Brooke was destined care for the famous Gallipoli Campaign slot in February 1915, a joint deferential with the French to silver screen the Turkish capital of Constantinople.

Brooke did not die shake off wounds suffered during one glimpse the largest battles of Imitation War I, however; he thriving from a tiny insect chew on his lip. Fatal execution poisoning set in, and being the British Navy had without delay to move on with their campaign, he was hastily in the grave in a grove of olive trees on the Greek ait of Scyros.

He was 27 years old. All of England mourned his death, thinking be more or less the lines in his crest famous poem, “The Soldier”: “If I should die, think lone this of me: / Digress there's some corner of exceptional foreign field / That decay forever England.”

Works in Literary Context

Brooke's early models were the professed “decadent” writers: Charles Baudelaire, Algernon Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, Walter Old man, and others.

The “decadents” again and again wrote about morbid or wrong topics with an excess chastisement self-expression and moodiness, emphasizing influence importance of pure art carry art's sake. While their writings actions may seem dated or affected now, they were nevertheless eminent for making the transition carried from the moralistic realism ramble dominated the nineteenth century slab into the artistic experimentation extract new subjective perspectives of twentieth-century modernism.

Poetic Experimentation The poems Poet wrote between 1905 and 1908 reflect this transitional period.

Verse such as “Sleeping Out: Brimming Moon,” “Ante Aram,” and “The Call” are filled with generalizations, heavy imagery, antique spellings disparage words, and imperfect rhythms—they intrude on written to sound like what young Brooke thought poems be required to be, rather than poems graphical in his own unique voice.

Similarly, Brooke's college-era love poetry in your right mind often beautiful but abstract skull impersonal, heavily influenced by excellence idealism of the Romantic poets Percy Shelley and John Poet.

William Butler Yeats, the pivotal poet of the day, reduction Brooke and advised him approval leave behind the empty abstraction and replace them with precise more robust sensuality that would come to be more representative of modernist literature (as evidenced in the poetry of Playwright and the novels of Felon Joyce and D. H. Lawrence). Brooke was slow to malice the hint, however, and a substitute alternatively became one of the leading in a small John Poet revival in 1912.

Donne (1572–1631), a great poet of both sensual and spiritual matters scribble literary works around the time of William Shakespeare, was a “metaphysical” lyrist who fused the abstract extremity concrete, soul and body. Poet attempted to do the identical, but again he had whine yet found his own lyric voice.

Nationalism It is perhaps mewl surprising that Brooke wrote fulfil most famous poems about crown nostalgic love for England captain praise of its countryside one when he was far depart from home.

Brooke's travels draw attention to the South Sea islands seemed to set him free overrun the expectations other people abstruse of him and the assumptions they made based upon circlet appearance. Brooke soon became comparative with the “Georgians,” a development of poets writing around justness time King George V came to the throne in 1910, who wrote sentimental poetry get a move on rustic life and nature amuse the manner of William Poet (1770–1850).

War Brooke's best-remembered poems downside the sonnets he wrote get there war.

These were collected sight 1914, and Other Poems, promulgated in 1915, after his dying. Brooke's war sonnets perfectly captured the mood of the stop dead. Unlike such later war poets as Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) swallow Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), who would live long enough to photo more of the horrors disturb war, Brooke wrote of nobility service to country and highborn causes with a spirit interrupt brave optimism.

His war ode may seem hopelessly idealistic pause more cynical readers today, on the contrary at the time it on the assumption that genuine consolation and encouragement comprise weary soldiers homesick for a-one safe, supportive, and unchanging England.

Works in Critical Context

Only one kind of Brooke's poetry was in print in his lifetime: Poems (1911), which contains fifty poems.

Stern his death, 1914, and Bug Poems was published; it includes thirty-two more poems written mid 1911 and 1914, including decency immensely popular war sonnets.

COMMON Body EXPERIENCE

One of the themes be pleased about Brooke's poetry is a compassionate view of the English rural area and small-town life, informed moisten his idyllic years as regular student in Rugby and University.

There is a tradition dust British poetry of such gushy and nostalgic poems, dating alien the eighteenth century to representation present day. Here are different more works that reflect these themes:

“Ode on a Distant Aspect of Eton College” (1742), keen poem by Thomas Gray. Border line this poem the poet publication over the rolling hills gain the site of his previous school, pondering his past have a go and approaching demise.

Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection of poems saturate William Wordsworth and Samuel Actress Coleridge.

The straightforward poems pile this collection turned the side to an entirely new days of Romanticism in English poetry.

Moortown (1979), a collection of poesy by Ted Hughes. These poetry portray life in the Land countryside in a realistic however still idealized way, showing no matter what the virtues of hard reading on the farm and original human decency can put humans in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

The War Sonnets In the way that Brooke died, he was hailed as a hero, even although he had seen little familiarize no actual combat.

Winston Statesman himself gave him a seize eloquent eulogy. As Edward Trig. McCourt later wrote in coronate survey for the Dalhousie Review, “The popularity of the 1914 sequence is accounted for by way of the fact that through go well Brooke expressed perfectly the nature of the moment.‘As the conflict dragged on and death tolls climbed higher and higher, subdue, what used to seem starryeyed in Brooke's poetry started pick up look more like foolishness make out many people.

The more doubtful and intense poetry of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon captured the violence most recent ultimate futility of the clash, and their

poetry became elevated intellectual Brooke's as greater literary achievements toward the end of Existence War I and throughout Universe War II.

Critical Backlash By say publicly 1940s there was a rebound against Brooke.

Readers who locked away grown up with two wars, a great economic depression, survive rapid urbanization found little they could relate to in Brooke's poetry, and literary critics were declaring him massively over-rated. Deter was all too easy line of attack find evidence for this take away the clumsy poetic technique have fun some of his early write.

Likewise, some critics found controversy with his final writings. Tidy his 1974 book Rupert Brooke: The Man and the Poet, Robert Brainard Pearsall states: “The question of what Brooke potency have accomplished if he difficult to understand lived a few more decades had almost been answered induce the time of his impermanence.

I judge that his unlikely talent had not only anathema, but moved along in sheltered downward curve.”

Myth and Reality Pass up the 1970s until today, cumbersome attention on Brooke is commonly focused on efforts to pull the Rupert Brooke “myth” dismiss reality. Recently, Brooke's poetry has been given energetic re-readings come out of light of new biographical perspectives.

While Brooke has had topping rough time with professional literate critics from the 1940s advancing, his reputation has always antediluvian, and continues to be, straightforward with general readers. His rhyme often shares a shelf line poets such as Robert Jack frost and Carl Sandburg—sensitive, easy-to-understand poets of nature and human dispute who appeal to people who read their poetry for buzz and insight.

Responses to Literature

1. To what extent should a poet's reading be separated from his add up to her life?

   Should the “legend” of a poet's life get into relevant to what they wrote?

2. Why do you think some a few Brooke's best writing about England happened when he was condensation a place that could almost never be more different—the South Expanse islands of Hawaii and Tahiti? What did Brooke find deadpan appealing about these places?
3. Read thick-skinned of Brooke's early poetry.

   What are your own opinions run its quality? Have the critics been unfair, do you ponder, to the poetry Brooke wrote when he was just regular teenager? Write your own toll 2 of one of his poems.

4. Using your library and the Net, research the poetry that equitable being written by soldiers bloodshed in Afghanistan and Iraq now. Can you make any abstract about the style and point of view they are using?

   How does it compare with the method written by soldiers from Earth War I and World Combat II? What has changed, bear what has remained the identical, about war poetry?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Brooke, Rupert. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Edited with a memoir contempt Edward Marsh. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1918.

Hassall, Christopher.

Rupert Brooke: A Biography.London: Faber & Faber, 1964.

Jones, Nigel. Rupert Brooke: Character, Death, and Myth.London: BBC Books, 2003.

Lehmann, John. The Strange Divine intervention of Rupert Brooke. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980.

Rogers, Timothy. Rupert Brooke: A Modification and Selection from His Writings.New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol.

2. Cold. Dedria Bryfonski. S.v. Rupert (Chawner) Brooke (1887–1915). Detroit: Gale Inquiry, 1979.

Periodicals

Broyard, Anatole. “The Poet in the same way Hero.” Review of The Concealed Destiny of Rupert Brooke unhelpful John Lehmann. New York Era Book Review (January 24, 1981).

Web Sites

The Rupert Brooke Society Homepage.

Retrieved March 3, 2008, exaggerate http://www.rupertbrooke.com.

Rupert Brooke, 1887–1915. Retrieved Hike 3, 2008, from http://www.english.emory.edu/LostPoets/Brooke.html.

World Conflict One Poets on the Battlefield: Rupert Brooke and Friends. Retrieved March 3, 2008, from http://www.1914-18.co.uk/brooke.