Among other quintessentially English anniversaries—Shakespeare’s birthday, St. George’s Day—April 23rd marks a hundred years since the death of Rupert Brooke, who for most of the past century has ranked among Britain’s best-known and most beloved cultural figures. A poet of the First World War who never saw action, he is famous mainly for one sonnet, “The Soldier,” from a sequence of five, and then mainly for its opening lines: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” Upper-class and stiff-upper-lipped, blond-haired and blue-eyed, eager to sacrifice youth and beauty for king and country, Brooke embodied a romantic and remarkably tenacious national fantasy. He was a minor celebrity before he died and a monstrous one afterward, holding on, to this day, to his fame and a rather tattered glory.
By the centennial of the First World War, Brooke ought to have faded to a scholarly footnote, along with other war-romanticizing poets such as Julian Grenfell and Vera Brittain’s fiancé, Roland Leighton. His 1914 sonnets and their torrent of imitations, published daily in newspapers along with the casualty lists, later came to represent the callous idiocy of the generals and politicians who blundered through the war until millions of people were dead. But the idea that Brookish innocence vanished at the first sight of a rat-bitten corpse in a trench is, of course, much too simple, and it conceals a continuing battle over the war’s meaning. As recently as last January, the U.K.’s Conservative education secretary, Michael Gove, attacked the “left-wing myths,” taught in British schools, that the war was a “misbegotten shambles.” Unquestioning, self-sacrificing patriotism of the kind Brooke represented remains a powerful right-wing myth—never mind that the poet was a committed Fabian socialist for much of his life. As so often happens, the truth about Rupert Brooke is more interesting than the political and biographical myths that have followed him.
Brooke enlisted almost as soon as the war broke out, like most young men of his class, and finagled an officer’s commission in the Royal Naval Division under the command of Winston Churchill. He composed the “1914” sonnets in October, during the evacuation of the Belgian fortified city of Antwerp—a bloodless action by the later standards of the Western Front, although the sight of columns of refugees fleeing the city shook him. In the end, to Brooke and his classically educated fellow officers, Belgium was nothing: they were sailing to Troy. In the spring of 1915, Brooke was on his way to the Dardanelles, the strategically essential waterway between Europe and Asia known to the ancient Greeks as the Hellespont. Homer and Herodotus were his guides, Brooke wrote to his mother, as he sailed over the “sapphire sea, swept by ghost of triremes and quinqueremes.” On April 25th, Allied troops would make a muddled, bloody landing on the Gallipoli peninsula, the start of a disastrous nine-month campaign. Brooke missed it by two days—a mosquito bite and a blood infection sent him down among the Greek ghosts. He was buried in an olive grove on the island of Skyros in the sapphire-blue Aegean.
In the library of King’s College, Cambridge, Brooke’s alma mater, there is a privately printed account of his death and burial, based on the log of the French hospital ship where he died. Over eleven excruciating pages (“Oh pale, pale, English face that no one will look on ever again! Face of passion, of dreams, and of torment!”), it establishes the twin poles of the Brooke myth, painting him as a literary hero, for dying in Greece like Byron, and as a figure of national political importance—he was attended throughout his illness and death by the Prime Minister’s son, his comrade Arthur “Oc” Asquith. His death, which came barely three weeks after the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral recited “The Soldier” during the Easter Sunday service, seemed like the fulfillment of the poem’s prophecy. Its particular unmartial circumstances quickly ceased to matter—an obituary by Winston Churchill, which ran in the London Times_,__ _attributed his death to sunstroke. The symbolism was all. When the British came to lay out their war cemeteries, the organization in charge made Brooke’s poem come literally true: instead of gathering the dead into vast ossuaries, as the French did, the British established grave plots of varying sizes at the corners of “foreign fields.” Through a technical land-lease agreement, they became, forever, English.
Churchill’s brief obituary was part of a longer remembrance of Brooke by the politician’s private secretary, Edward Marsh, a patron of the arts who became Brooke’s literary executor. Marsh had become infatuated with the young poet after seeing him on stage, dressed in a thigh-grazing blue tunic, in a production of “The Eumenides”_ during his first term at Cambridge. In July 1918, after three years of battling Brooke’s formidable mother, Marsh published the first, highly sanitized account of Brooke’s life. It was the start of a reverent biographical trajectory that reached its apotheosis in Christopher Hassall’s fiftieth-anniversary door-stopper, published in 1964, which lavished attention on Brooke’s early life but could not draw on the sheaves of scandalous letters in Brooke’s correspondence, which were strictly embargoed by the trustees of his estate. The first collection of Brooke’s letters, edited by his old friend Geoffrey Keynes and published in 1968, was also heavily censored. After Hassall, most of the biographical work on Brooke has been a process of dismantling the golden-boy myth as new letters and new lovers have appeared. Just last month, the publication of several previously unseen letters and of a memoir by Phyllis Gardner, one of several women with whom Brooke was involved in the years before the war, prompted one of his recent biographers to brand him a “vicious sadist” in the Daily Mail._
Brooke was born in 1887, the second of three boys. He was six years younger than Richard, an alcoholic who died during Rupert’s first year at Cambridge, and three years older than Alfred, who was killed in action two months after Rupert’s death. Between Richard and Rupert there was a daughter who died in infancy, and their mother apparently often told Rupert that he ought to have been a girl, instilling in him a profound anxiety about his sexuality. His father was a schoolmaster at Rugby, the English public school where Thomas Arnold developed an austere and brutal system that was intended to mold boys into imperial leaders. Handsome, sporting and literary, Rupert acquitted himself decently. At the prep school he attended from age eight to thirteen, he became close with James Strachey, the younger brother of the more famous Lytton Strachey, and later, at Rugby, he was good friends with Geoffrey Keynes, the younger brother of the more famous John Maynard Keynes. He once wrote James Strachey, who was in love with him, a notorious letter detailing a sexual encounter with a friend from Rugby. (Strachey went on to become a psychoanalyst and, with his wife, Alix, the preëminent translator of Freud.) Brooke was well aware of his appeal to both men and women—he could hardly fail to be. Just about everyone who met him described his physical appearance in rapturous terms. “That is exactly what Adonis must have looked like in the eyes of Aphrodite,” Leonard Woolf wrote. Yeats dubbed him “the handsomest young man in England.”
Brooke’s female admirers were hardly less effusive; he inspired a poem by his friend Frances Cornford that begins, “A young Apollo, golden-haired.” Around the same time that he was romancing Phyllis Gardner, he was also writing ardent letters to fifteen-year-old Noël Olivier (cousin of Laurence), tormenting his devoted companion Katherine (Ka) Cox, and setting his sights on the successful stage actress Cathleen Nesbitt. In 1912, his complicated love life triggered a severe emotional breakdown, during which he broke bitterly with the so-called “buggers” of Bloomsbury and went to Tahiti to recuperate (where he may have fathered a child). The war, when it came, appeared to him a relief. In the first and most disturbing of his 1914 sonnets, “Peace,” the speaker thanks God for the moral purification of the war, toward which recruits rush like “swimmers into cleanness leaping.” (Brooke was notorious for his love of naked swimming, and went skinny-dipping with most of his friends, including Virginia Woolf.)
Brooke’s death and his elevation to icon swept this history as clean as he hoped the war would sweep his soul, leaving all of the beauty and none of the bitterness. In a series of portrait photographs taken by Sherrill Schell a year before Brooke died, there is one (which his friends jokingly referred to as “Your Favorite Actress”) that shows him in profile, bare-chested, swan-necked, with his famous golden hair swept back. It was used as the frontispiece to “1914 and Other Poems,” and then, in 1919, it was reproduced in stone for a memorial in the chapel at Rugby School, above a carving of “The Soldier.” Image and poem together fix Brooke as the young idealist who knows so little of the war that he believes the ground where he’s buried will stay undisturbed by heavy artillery. But it’s worth remembering that Brooke’s original title for this poem was “The Recruit,” which acknowledges that the speaker has no real idea what he’s talking about. The British recruitment campaigns in the early months of the war were uncompromising. Posters and advertisements shamed men into enlisting, threatening their masculinity and citizenship, and told women that any man who was “unfaithful” to his country would be just as duplicitous to his girl. After the battles of Mons and Ypres and Gallipoli, enlistment declined; conscription was not introduced until 1916. Rupert Brooke’s heroic sacrifice, mosquito or no mosquito, was an invaluable boost to a flagging campaign.
For a long time, the history of the First World War has been understood via the symbolic transition from Brooke to Wilfred Owen, from posh idiot nationalist to heroic witness. That simple narrative obscures the extent to which Owen worshipped Brooke in the early days and just how long Brooke remained the war’s most famous poet. Until the nineteen-sixties, when the “left-wing myths” about the war gained purchase, Brooke’s sonnets and his image still seemed to represent something true and comforting. In the mid-nineties, an anthology of the nation’s hundred favorite poems included three each by Brooke and Owen, although only one of Brooke’s, “The Soldier,” was a war poem. At the hundredth anniversary of his death, as more letters and lovers are revealed, Brooke is making more headlines as a famous playboy than as a poet or patriot.
It’s impossible to know what Brooke might have written if he had seen what the other war poets saw, or what he might have become if he’d survived his own golden age. In his small body of work, the war sonnets are anomalous—his verse is usually more playful, less po-faced. Like his contemporaries in the pre-war poetry scene, he was preoccupied with trying to shake off the long Victorian hangover. (Several decades later, T. S. Eliot wrote, “The situation of poetry in 1909 or 1910 was stagnant to a degree difficult for any young poet of today to imagine.”) Brooke wanted to shock and to shake things up, but doing so was almost too easy—he lost a fight over the title of a poem called “Lust,” which his publisher insisted on elevating into “Libido.” Describing bodily functions with any degree of realism—as he did in the witty sonnet “A Channel Passage,” graphically equating lovesickness and seasickness—could make you notorious.
As with the work of many writers whose worlds have so thoroughly vanished and whose lives have sunk into myth, it can be hard to grasp the humor and the lightness in Brooke’s writing. Some of his best writing is contained in “Letters from America,” a collection of essays written in 1913 for the Westminster Gazette_,_ one of which begins, with characteristic boldness, “In five things America excels modern England—fish, architecture, jokes, drinks, and children’s clothes.” The record of his first encounters with the alien maelstrom of New York and the vast landscapes of the West are blunt and funny and startling in their immediacy, as if a statue bent down and tapped on your shoulder to point out a billboard on Broadway. Just for a second, you might even think the man on the pedestal was real.
