Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Brooke, Rupert
BROOKE, RUPERT (1887-1915), poet, was born at Rugby 3 August 1887, the second of three brothers. His father was William Parker Brooke, a master at Rugby School, and his mother was Mary Ruth Cotterill. His school life, in his father’s house at Rugby, was normal and happy. He played cricket and football for the school, read widely in English, wrote quantities of verse in the obsolescent manner of the nineties, and won prizes with poems on The Pyramids and The Bastille. In 1906 he went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he soon entered into the full swim of university life and became a popular and conspicuous figure. Young Cambridge, in his mind, was to be the centre of the most vital movements in literature, art, drama, and social progress; and to this end he worked. He was a member of the ‘Apostles’, and became president of the University Fabian society, which he hoped to convert from what seemed to him a hard and selfish outlook to an ideal based on sympathy rather than on class warfare, and on faith in what he called ‘the real though sometimes overgrown goodness of all men’. He took a leading part in founding the Marlowe society, and acted in its performances of Dr. Faustus and Comus. He read for the classical tripos, but worked harder at English. ‘There are only three things in the world,’ he said,—‘one is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.’ His most distinctively favourite poet was Donne, and he made a careful study of the Elizabethans, winning the Harness prize with an essay, Puritanism in the Early Drama, and a fellowship at King’s (1912) with a dissertation on John Webster.
After taking his degree in 1909, Brooke made himself a second home at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, where he settled down for the next three years to a life of reading and bathing, varied by visits to London, Munich, and Berlin, and by a term at Rugby during which he acted as house-master after the sudden death of his father early in 1910. In December 1911 he published a volume of Poems, which aroused a good deal of interest, and next year he wrote a one-act play, Lithuania, which showed considerable dramatic power. Meanwhile he was spending more and more time in London. His remarkable and prepossessing good looks and his evident goodwill made him an attractive figure, and he was beginning to be known among a large and varied circle of interesting friends as a man of exceptional promise and charm—‘a creature’, as was written of him by Henry James, ‘on whom the gods had smiled their brightest’.
In May 1913 Brooke set out for a year of travel, beginning with New York and Boston, and then going across Canada and down to San Francisco. He next sailed to Hawaii, and after short visits to Samoa, Fiji, and New Zealand he stayed for some months in Tahiti, whence he sent home several poems for publication in New Numbers, a quarterly in which he joined forces with Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater, and Wilfrid Gibson. These poems, together with his essay, Some Niggers, show how willingly and completely he had yielded himself to the spirit of the island life.
In June 1914 he came home across America, intending to settle down at Cambridge. The War came in August, and he has left a record of his feelings on hearing the news, when ‘as he thought “England and Germany’’, the word “England” seemed to flash like a line of foam’. In September he was given a commission in the Royal Naval Division, and he took part in the Antwerp expedition in October. ‘Apart from the tragedy’, he wrote, ‘I’ve never felt happier or better in my life than in those days in Belgium. And now I’ve the feeling of anger at a seen wrong to make me happier and more resolved in my work.’ After Antwerp the division went to Blandford for training, and about Christmas he wrote the five war-sonnets which appeared in the last issue of New Numbers, and quickly became known. On 28 February 1915 the division sailed for the Dardanelles and spent some time ‘drifting about’, as he said, ‘like a bottle in some corner of the bay at a seaside resort’. Sir Ian Hamilton at Port Said offered Brooke a post on his staff, but he preferred to stay with his platoon. Soon after this he was attacked by blood-poisoning, which his constitution, weakened by a sunstroke, was unable to resist; and after two days’ illness he died and was buried at Scyros on 23 April. He had left directions that the profits of his writings were to be divided among three of his brother poets. ‘If I can set them free to any extent’, he said, ‘to write the poetry and plays and books they want to, my death will be more gain than loss.’ He was unmarried.
Besides the Poems of 1911 and the posthumous volume 1914 and other Poems, there have been published Brooke’s fellowship dissertation, John Webster, a work of scholarship and insight, and the Letters from America which he wrote for the Westminster Gazette, and of which in especial the sections on Niagara and The Rockies show him as an accomplished writer of prose. Mention must also be made of the fine quality of his familiar letters, many of which appear in the memoir prefixed to his Collected Poems (1916). But his main reputation will rest on the two small books of verse. Of the pieces in the earlier volume, many were written under the ‘ninetyish’ influence already mentioned, and were condemned by the author himself for ‘unimportant prettiness’; a few, which at the time attracted disproportionate attention, were studies in ugliness and the bravado of precocious disillusionment; but the best, such as Dining-room Tea and The Fish, had the qualities of ‘adventurousness, curiosity, and life-giving youthfulness’, of ‘sharpness and distinctness’ of vision, which led Walter de la Mare to class him as a poet of the intellectual imagination. These qualities, together with a peculiar power of combining humour with poetic beauty and tenderness of feeling, as in The Old Vicarage and Tiare Tahiti, are still more marked in the second volume, which also showed ever-increasing technical ability, for instance in an easy mastery over the octosyllabic couplet, and in certain slight and subtle novelties in the construction of the sonnet. It remained for the few fragments written on the way to the Dardanelles to show that his instrument had fallen from his hands at the moment when he had brought it to perfection.
[Memoir by Edward Marsh prefixed to Collected Poems, 1916; Walter de la Mare, Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, 1919; John Drinkwater, Rupert Brooke, an Essay (privately printed 1916); private information.]