1914 V: The Soldier Poem by Rupert Brooke - Poem Hunter 1914 V: The Soldier Poem by Rupert Brooke - Poem Hunter 1914 V: The Soldier - Poem by Rupert Brooke Autoplay next video 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; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. (11/27/2016 12:14:00 AM) 1914 V: The Soldier Were the sentiments of the soldier fair and genuine? ..........

Patriotism is something good.But, for what purpose one has to die in the name of the country is a question. Very much thought provoking. (Report) Reply Ratnakar Mandlik (11/26/2016 10:35:00 PM) Patriotism occupying the whole being of the soldier manifested through a great patriotic song. Thanks for sharing it here. (Report) Reply (11/26/2016 9:26:00 PM) This kind of sentiment allows war. This kind of sentiment permits war. Were it any country other than England, this sentiment would be thought vile. When will people wake up. What this rather unanalytical poet never guessed is that his own country's policies brought on his demise. Or if he realized it, he didn't care. Such sentiments make good copy, though. Revolting. For shame. There'll always be an England. (Report) Reply (11/26/2016 9:16:00 PM) This kind of sentiment causes war. This kind of sentiment causes war. Were it any other country invoked than England, it would be considered reprehensible.

What this rather dense poet didn't realize is that his countries policies caused his demise. Sentiments like these make good copy, though. (Report) Reply John Richter (2/6/2015 12:05:00 PM) Rupert did die in that war.... Which certainly involved England. You must imagine a man sitting in a trench with his paper and pen, watching men die, screaming in most horrible ways. Then think if he wondered what it was that brought him to that place. Of course it was the love of his country, of everything he knew, the great love for family and friends, and their shared respect for peace. Then I think we could conclude if this is as good or lesser than any of his other poems. I think it is exactly marvelous and touching, as I feel exactly the same about my own country. (Report) Reply Reframing First World War poetry - The British Library Reframing First World War poetry Theme: Representation and memory Dr Santanu Das considers how the examination of war poetry has changed and looks beyond typical British trench lyric to explore the variety of poetic responses.

Dr Santanu Das gives an introduction to the poetry of the First World War, providing fascinating commentary on a range of topics, supported by literary manuscripts and historical footage. In some papers found in his kit after his death in the Battle of Loos on 13 October 1915, the twenty-year-old Charles Hamilton Sorley had scribbled in pencil what would become one of the most celebrated sonnets of the First World War: When you see millions of the mouthless dead Across your dreams in pale battalions go, Say not soft things as other men have said, That you’ll remember. For you need not so. Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know It is not curses heaped on each gashed head? Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow. Nor honour. It is easy to be dead. Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto, ‘Yet many a better one has died before.’ Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you Perceive one face that you loved heretofore, It is a spook. None wears the face you knew. Great death has made all his for evermore.

[1] Repeatedly anthologised, yet forever startling. The power of this bleak, disturbing sonnet partly lies in the way the insistent rhythm and the desolate imagery of the octave reach some sort of climax in the opening lines of the sestet with the exhortation and the classical allusion (the quotation in line 10 refers to Patroclus’s death in the Iliad), only to be intensified by the haunting gaze (‘Then, scanning. . .’) and the sudden, ominous, darkly comic shock of ‘It is a spook’. The eeriness of the image is enhanced by the poignant circumstances of the poem’s posthumous discovery. Sorley’s poem operates on that fine threshold where poetic form and personal tragedy meet. Dr Santanu Das explores the manuscript for Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est', revealing new insights into the composition of one of World War One's most well-known poems. Often regarded as the ‘transitional’ figure between the early and later soldier-poets, Sorley, like his poem, was unusual for the time.

[2] Yet, the poem provides one of the earliest examples of what we now regard as the classic features of First World War poetry: the lyric testimony of the broken body – mouth, eyes, the ‘gashed’ head – set against the abstract rhetoric of honour; the address to the reader (‘you’) that we associate with the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, as opposed to the egotistical ‘I’ of Rupert Brooke; the ‘pale battalions’ haunting the shell-shocked dreams of veterans, John Singer Sargent’s dream-like Gassed (1919) and Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and becoming the iconic image of the war. Robert Graves found Sorley’s poetry so powerful that he introduced it to Sassoon, who in turn introduced it to Wilfred Owen. And spook-like, First World War poetry knows no habitation or rest. Mixing cultural memory with linguistic desire, First World War poetry has ranged far beyond the covers of the book.

It appears on postcards, posters and in politicians’ speeches, in memorials and epitaphs, and has inspired every art form, from Sean O’Casey’s play The Silver Tassie (1928) and Benjamin Britten’s musical tribute War Requiem (1962) to the BBC TV series Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) and Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration (1991). Images John Fould's 1919-1921 composition A World Requiem designed to be a musical memorial for the dead. Over the last hundred years, the image of the First World War soldier as damaged but resilient has remained etched on British cultural consciousness, partly formed and periodically reinforced by the reading of a handful of soldier-poets, particularly Owen and Sassoon. Other important soldier-poets include Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gurney, Robert Graves, Edward Thomas, David Jones, Francis Ledgwidge, and Isaac Rosenberg, and of course the golden-haired young man whose ‘begloried’ war sonnets they all opposed and yet one who haunts their work: Rupert Brooke.

More than any other genre – fiction, memoir or film – it is the poetry of the trenches, as represented by a small group of ‘anti-war’ soldier-poets, that has come to dominate First World War memory. We seldom read such poetry; it is usually a matter of re-reading, remembering, returning – with familiarity, surprise, sometimes resistance. We associate it with a part of our former selves. Today, the poetry of the soldier-poets has coalesced, beyond literary history and cultural memory , into a recognisable structure of feeling. Herein lies an undeniable part of its power and some of the larger critical problems. For the scope of First World War poetry is much wider than that of the trench lyric. There is a substantial and distinguished body of war poetry by male civilian poets, including Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and D.H. Lawrence, as well as by women-poets such as Charlotte Mew, Mary Borden, Vera Brittain, Rose Macaulay and Margaret Postgate Cole.

The poetry of the First World War is often regarded as peculiarly ‘English’, but many of the soldier-poets had a conflicted relation to ‘Englishness’: Sorley was Anglo-Scottish, Rosenberg and Sassoon (on his father’s side) were Jewish, Ledwidge was Irish, while Owen, Jones and Thomas could trace their recent family history to Wales. Moreover, war poetry was produced across Europe, by poets as diverse as Giuseppe Ungaretti, Georg Trakl, Guillaume Apollinaire and Anna Akhmatova , and further afield from countries such as Australia and New Zealand, Canada, India, the West Indies and Turkey. Joy of Shipwrecks, a book of poetry Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti was inspired by the tragedy of war to write the Joy of Shipwrecks. Free from known copyright restrictions Form and history One of the achievements of war poetry has been to democratise poetry itself. Its centrality in the school curriculum means that, for many, it represents their first encounter with poetry – and not just in Great Britain.

When I was a student in Kolkata, the former capital of British India, the figures of the two ‘Tommies’ standing guard by the city’s Cenotaph-like First World War memorial always blended in my mind with Owen and Sassoon whom we read at Presidency College, which claimed to have the oldest English department in the world. In India, as in many other countries, First World War poetry spoke with a British accent. And of all the literary genres, it was one that remained most tightly cling-filmed around an event, and conjured up the iconic images – trenches, barbed wire, gas, rats, mud. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has argued that the substance of myth ‘does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells’. [3] In the classroom, First World War poetry often ceases to be poetry and begins to look like history by proxy. Neither the transparent envelope of experience nor just language whispering to itself about itself, First World War poetry represents one of those primal moments when poetic form bears most fully the weight of historical trauma.

[4] Art and testimony are often yoked together by real-life violence, leading to formal realignment, invention or dissonance. Categories such as ‘pro-war’ and ‘anti-war’ often prove inadequate, when tested against the complexity of individual poems. Similarly, combatant, non-combatant and women’s poetry operated within a larger poetic field and shared common ground. For many scholars, the very term ‘war poetry’ is problematic: indeed, a ‘war poem’ contains much besides the war. As Simon Featherstone has noted, the label may confine the poem, artificially, within the parenthesis of the war years. War is crucial to the poetry and its intensities of meaning, but it is not the only – or isolated – focus of attention or analysis.

First World War poetry looks before and after the war, joining past and future, and combatant and civilian zones; it speaks in varying cadences not just of combat, but also of life at large – of beauty, longing, religion, nature, animals, intimacy, historical change, poetic responsibility, Europe and Englishness, race, democracy and empire, or what it is for women to have ‘years and years in which we shall still be young’ [5] – all touched directly or indirectly by the war. Jessie Pope's War Poems Free from known copyright restrictions Copyright: © Jessie Pope, Grant Richards A constant tension in writings on First World War poetry is whether the accent should fall on war or on poetry, on cultural history or on literary form. If the surrounding material world was important to the soldier-poets, so was a sense of poetic tradition.

Investigation into the literary culture of the trenches – from Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1972) to Jon Stallworthy’s Survivors’ Songs: From Maldon to the Somme (2008) – shows the intense engagement of this group of soldier-poets with a vast range of literature, from the Iliad through Shakespeare, Milton and the Romantics to Hardy and Housman.

The finest trench poetry revels in the meeting of tradition and innovation: in Gurney’s exquisite handling of meter, punctuation and sibilance in the terrifying image of ‘Darkness, shot at: I smiled, as politely replied –’ (‘The Silent One’); in Sassoon’s powerful rhymes which compact visceral horror and religious blasphemy while conjuring up the commonest trench expletive – ‘And someone flung his burden in the muck/Mumbling: ‘O Christ Almighty, now I’m stuck’ (‘Redeemer’); or in Owen’s intricate negotiation with Keats’s ‘To a Nightingale’ as he relocates sensuousness in the frozen landscape of the Western Front: ‘Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us ...’ (‘Exposure’). Similarly, a number of women-poets both inherit and interrogate different traditions of lyric verse with remarkable power as they try to represent the war and its effects on civilian spaces and minds.

Consider the following poem ‘Afterwards’ by Margaret Postgate Cole – at once a poignant elegy, a powerful critique of the war and a negotiation with the pastoral tradition – as it moves beyond the battlefields or the actual years of the war to a postwar sense of futility and desolation: And peace came. And lying in Sheer I look round at the corpses of the larches Whom they slew to make pit-props For mining the coal for the great armies. ... And if these years have made you into a pit-prop, To carry the twisting galleries of the world’s reconstruction (Where you may thank God, I suppose, That they set you the sole stay of a nasty corner) What use is it to you? The canon: its formation and expansion The ‘war poet’ and ‘war poetry’, observed Robert Graves in 1942, were ‘terms first used in World War I and perhaps peculiar to it’ [6] .

From Anglo-Saxon times to the Boer War, war poetry in English was written largely by civilians and did not have a clearly defined identity; with the extraordinary outpouring between 1914 and 1918, it established itself as a genre and the soldier-poet became a species. On Easter Sunday 1915, when Dean Inge read out ‘The Soldier’ by Brooke from the pulpit at St Paul’s Cathedral, he was at once creating and anointing a secular saint: the ‘poet soldier’. Poems by Rupert Brooke 'The Dead' and 'The Soldier' Rupert Brooke's The Soldier was one of the most famous poems written during the war. Some rights reserved Copyright: © © Rupert Brooke Over the next three years, the ‘poet soldier’ would morph into ‘soldier-poet’, and by the 1930s he had become, according to Edmund Blunden, ‘as familiar as a ration card’ [7] . The term ‘war poetry’ or ‘war verse’, by contrast, starts gaining currency from 1917 and crests in popularity in the post-war years.

In her 1917 essay ‘Contemporary British War Poetry, Music and Patriotism’, Marion Scott – friend and music teacher of Ivor Gurney – noted an ‘enormous increase in poetic output’ related to the war, ranging ‘from genius to doggerel’ [8] . This was partly the result of a conjunction of particular historical factors: a late Victorian culture of heroism and patriotism and a dominant public school ethos among the officer classes, as well as the more general spread of education. Above all, the processes of recruitment – first voluntary and then the Conscription Acts of 1916 – meant that the British army included an enormous number of highly educated young men. [9] According to Catherine Reilly’s exhaustive bibliography, some 2,225 poets from Britain and Ireland alone wrote war poetry; only a handful among them are remembered today. [10] In his letters of 1917, Owen refers to ‘war impressions’, ‘war poem’ and ‘War Poetry’, but in the celebrated Preface (1918) to his intended collection of poems, he eschewed the term ‘war poet’: ‘That is why the true War Poets must be truthful’.

[11] The conflation of First World War poetry with the trench lyric was encouraged by the soldier-poets and anthologists, and consolidated with the publication of memoirs such as Graves’s Good-Bye to All That (1929) and Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). Rapidly, the trench poets claimed centre-stage; civilian poets such as Hardy and Kipling moved to the margins. In the politicized climate of the 1930s, Owen and Sassoon became cultural icons. Both figured prominently along with other combatant poets in Frederick Brereton’s Anthology of War Poems (1930) and Robert Nichols’s Anthology of War Poetry, 1914–18 (1943). However, it was with the renewed swell of interest in the group in the 1960s, with the musical Oh! What A Lovely War (1963) and anthologies such as Brian Gardner’s Up the Line to Death (1964) and I.M. Parsons’s Men Who March Away (1965), that the canon began to take shape more firmly.

The process was completed by, among others, two literary critics: Paul Fussell, with his enormously influential The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), and Jon Silkin, with the Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (1979). Over the last 30 years, the First World War and its literature have been powerfully reconfigured. The recovery in recent years of poetry by women, civilians, dissenters, working-class and non-English (particularly Irish, Scottish, Welsh and American) writers in anthologies has led both to an expansion and a rethinking of the canon. [12] Moreover, developments in the general critical field – cultural studies, queer theory, work on testimony and trauma – have left their mark. The frameworks and critical idiom used to understand the popular soldier-poets have accordingly shifted: we have moved from a moral register of the ‘truth of war’ to an exploration of textual complexity and wider socio-cultural contexts; there is closer interrogation of the relationship between poetic form and historical, political and psychic processes; and far greater attention is being paid to questions of difference (class, nationality, gender and sexuality, among others).

[13] Images On Heaven and poems was a collection of poems written on active service by Ford Maddox Ford. In spite of this, however, colonial war poetry remains barely visible even in the recently expanded canon. Colonial war poetry, coming out of different political, social and cultural contexts, is a remarkably copious and varied body of work: it ranges from volumes by individual soldier-poets to anthologies such as Soldier Songs from Anzac (1915), Indian Ink (1915–16) and Canada in Khaki (1917) to poems by established figures such as Rabindranath Tagore in India, Robert Service in Canada and Clarence Dennis in Australia. For a variety of reasons, such poetry – with the exception of John McCrae’s ubiquitous ‘In Flanders Fields’ – has proved resistant to assimilation within the war canon. Indeed, the project of recovering colonial or non-white First World War verse is not so much a matter of trying to find an Indian Owen or an Arab Sassoon, but trying to understand how the war affected the colonial poetic cultures more widely, In his poem, ‘The War Graves’, Michael Longley writes, ‘There will be no end to cleaning up after the war’.

[14] The war’s debris – both physical and metaphorical – will be inspected afresh in the next four years. War poetry is often too neatly aligned with a political and moral agenda. While it is crucial to recognise the political force of First World War poetry, individual poems can be more complex and disturbing. Indeed, why does that strange word ‘ecstasy’ (‘Gas! Gas! An ecstasy of fumbling/Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time’) appear in the most grimly realistic of war poems – Owen’s ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’? Indeed, ‘strange’ remains one of the most recurring words in First World War poetry, perhaps testifying to the strange fact that the traumatic debris of war would inspire, energise and even excite poetic language. Powerful war poems, such as Owen’s ‘Dulce’ or Hardy’s ‘I looked Up from My Writing’ often ask the most difficult ethical questions.

As we approach the centennial commemoration of the war with ceremony, and young men and women continue to get killed in action, these poems bring us no immediate hope or assurance or comfort, but in their combination of pity, anger, moral complexity and linguistic pleasure, remind us as readers what it is to be idealistic, thoughtful, mortal, guilty – and make us question what it is to be human. Extracted from the introductory chapter ‘Reframing First World War Poetry’ in Santanu Das ed. The Cambridge Companion to First World War Poetry (2013) Footnotes [1] Charles Hamilton Sorley, Marlborough and Other Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), 69. [2] Jon Stallworthy, Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War (London: Constable, 2002), 37. [3] Claude Levi-Strauss, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’ in Thomas A. Sebeok ed. Myth: A Symposium (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 86.

[4] Edna Longley has powerfully argued that First World War lyric poetry may be a ‘quintessential case’ of the ‘encounter between form and history’. See ‘The Great War, history, and the English lyric’, in Vincent Sherry ed. The Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 58. [5] Margaret Postgate Cole, ‘Praematuri’ in Catherine Reilly ed. The Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and Verse (London: Virago, 1997), 22. [6] Robert Graves, ‘The Poets of World War II’ (1942) in The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949), 307. [7] Edmund Blunden, ‘Introduction’ to Frederick Brereton ed. An Anthology of War Poems (London, 1930). 13.

[8] The title of Marion Scott’s essay ‘Contemporary British War Poetry, Music and Patriotism’ (The Musical Times, 1 March 1917, 120–1) suggests the recognition of a genre. There were exceptions such as R.H. Thornton’s War Verses: August, 1914 (1914), but it was from 1918 that anthologies with titles such as The Lyceum Book of War Verse (1918) and War Verse began to mushroom. I am grateful to Jane Potter for the reference to Scott’s article. [9] See, for example, Simon Featherstone ed. War Poetry: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 15. [10] Catherine Reilly, English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography (London: George Prior, 1978), xix. [11] ‘Preface’ in Jon Stallworthy ed. The Poems of Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990), 192. [12] See Featherstone ed.

War Poetry: An Introductory Reader (1995); ( 2002); Jon Stallworthy, Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War (2002); Vivien Noakes ed. Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry (2006); Dominic Hibberd and John Onions, eds. The Winter of the World: Poems of the Great War ( 2007) and Tim Kendall ed. Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (2013). Also see Catherine Reilly’s anthology Scars upon My Heart (1981) and Jon Stallwothy ed. The Oxford Book of War Poetry (1984). [13] See the long introduction to Featherstone, War Poetry: An Introductory Reader , 7-115, for an astute discussion of these shifts as registered within First World War poetry criticism. Also see the essays collected in Vincent Sherry ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Tim Kendall ed.

The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson eds. The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) for a variety of critical approaches. [14] Michael Longley, ‘The War Graves’, in Collected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 256. Written by Rupert Brooke - Rupert Brooke Poems - Poem Hunter Rupert Brooke - Rupert Brooke Poems - Poem Hunter Do you like this poet? Rupert Brooke Poems 1914 V: The Soldier If I should die, think only this of ... 1914 I: Peace Now, God be thanked Who has watched us with His... 1914 Iv: The Dead These hearts were woven of human joys and ... Beauty And Beauty When Beauty and Beauty meet All naked, ... All poems of Rupert Brooke » Search in the poems of Rupert Brooke: A man of great physical beauty by reputation, Rupert Brooke was born in Rugby, Warwickshire where he attended the local school.

He then gained entry into King's College, Cambridge (1905-11) where he became a Fellow in 1912. He travelled extensively and wrote many travel letters for the 'Westminster Gazette', London (1912-13). At the start of the First World War in 1914, he was assigned to the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He saw action at Antwerp which inspired the writing of five passionately patriotic sonnets, the last of them being The Soldier. He was at the height of his fame when he died during the war aged twenty-seven. He had been on his way to serve in the Dardanelles when he died ... more » Click here to add this poet to your My Favorite Poets. WWI Poetry: On Veterans Day, The Words Of War : NPR Heard on Morning Edition Four U.S. soldiers, runners for the 315th Infantry, pose in France in November 1918. The troops reportedly carried official orders to Lt. Col. Bunt near Etraye, France, shortly before noon, Nov. 11, 1918, announcing that the armistice had been signed, thereby ending World War I.

AP hide caption toggle caption AP Veterans Day — originally Armistice Day — was renamed in 1954 to include veterans who had fought in all wars. But the day of remembrance has its roots in World War I — Nov. 11, 1918 was the day the guns fell silent at the end of the Great War. On this Veterans Day, we celebrate the poetry of World War I, one of the legacies of that conflict. English poet Rupert Chawner Brooke died of dysentery aboard a troop ship headed for Gallipoli in April 1915. His poem "The Soldier" is one of the most famous poems written during World War I. Sherril Schell/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Sherril Schell/Getty Images English poet Rupert Chawner Brooke died of dysentery aboard a troop ship headed for Gallipoli in April 1915. His poem "The Soldier" is one of the most famous poems written during World War I. Sherril Schell/Getty Images Soldiers like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, John McCrae and Rupert Brooke wrote evocative poems about their experiences.

One of the most famous poems of the war is Brooke's "The Soldier." Brooke died of dysentery aboard a troop ship headed for Gallipoli in April 1915. The opening verse of "The Soldier" reads: 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; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. Every schoolchild learns some of these World War I poems and the classroom is one of the only places they can be found today. There's another poem — one most Americans don't know — that lives on around the world. Every year since 1921, the fourth verse of Laurence Binyon's "For the Fallen" has been read aloud at remembrance services in Britain and across the British Commonwealth countries. They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. Article continues after sponsorship Binyon wrote the poem in the fall of 1914, at the very beginning of the war, says Sarah Cole, an Associate Professor at Columbia University and author of Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War. More On Veterans Day A Veterans Day Without Veterans "It certainly represents an early moment of the war," Cole says. "... It's memorializations as anticipatory. ... They are setting the stage for thinking about and remembering the dead that are oncoming now." As for the poet himself, Binyon isn't that well known, largely because he wasn't a "soldier" poet, but Cole says he did play his part in the war — but as a non-combatant. At 46, he was too old to fight but he volunteered in with a hospital unit in France. "He was in-between generations," she explains.

There was the older generation of fathers "who are often condemned by some of the famous war poets as being kind of callously irresponsible and even kind of criminal in sending their sons off to be killed, but nor was he young enough to fight." Binyon wrote "For the Fallen" while sitting on the cliffs at Pentire Head in Cornwall after reading early casualty reports from the Western Front. A plaque commemorating his life was placed there in 2003. It's inscribed with the four lines that are still read aloud every year — nearly 100 years later. Rupert Brooke | Poetry Foundation Poetry Foundation Poet Details 1887–1915 Few writers have provoked as much excessive praise and scornful condemnation as English poet Rupert Brooke. Handsome, charming, and talented, Brooke was a national hero even before his death in 1915 at the age of twenty-seven. His poetry, with its unabashed patriotism and graceful lyricism, was revered in a country that was yet to feel the devastating effects of two world wars. Brooke's early death only solidified his image as "a golden-haired, blue-eyed English Adonis," as Doris L.

Eder notes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and among those who lauded him after his death were writers Virginia Woolf and Henry James and British statesman Winston Churchill. In the decades after World War I, however, critics reacted against the Brooke legend by calling his verse foolishly naive and sentimental. Despite such extreme opinions, most contemporary observers agree that Brooke—though only a minor poet—occupies a secure place in English literature as a representative of the mood and character of England before World War I. Brooke's early years were typical of virtually every English boy who was a member of a well-to-do family. He attended a prestigious boarding school—Rugby, where his father was a headmaster—studied Latin and Greek, and began to write poetry. It was taken for granted that Brooke would go on to one of the great English universities, and accordingly he entered Cambridge in 1906. During his three years at Cambridge, Brooke became a visible figure in English intellectual circles, counting among his acquaintances Virginia Woolf, writer Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes and his brother Geoffrey (later to become Brooke's bibliographer), and poet William Butler Yeats .

Brooke also continued to write poetry, although his poems from this period are, as Eder comments, "highly derivative, facile literary exercises." In The Neo-Pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth, Paul Delany gives an example of Brooke's verse from his Cambridge years. Written in 1909, "The Voice," like most of his early poetry, dwells on the themes of love and nature: "Safe in the magic of my woods / I lay, and watched the dying light / . . . The three that I loved, together grew / One, in the hour of knowing, / Night, and the woods, and you." Although his early work is thought to be of little significance, Brooke by this time was considered a serious though unaccomplished poet. In addition, he was an increasingly conspicuous figure in literary circles—a fame fueled without doubt by his charm and good looks. Between his graduation from Cambridge in 1909 and the start of World War I in 1914, Brooke spent most of his time writing and traveling. His poetry during this period, which still emphasized the themes of love and nature, resembled that of most of the poets of his generation, including D. H.

Lawrence , John Drinkwater, and Walter de la Mare. These poets came to be known as Georgian poets (named after England's king at the time); their verse reflects an idealistic preoccupation with rural, youthful motifs. In fact, Brooke and many of his friends enjoyed spending time in the countryside, bathing nude in local streams and sleeping on the ground; such activities earned them the nickname "neo-pagans." Eder points out that "Georgian verse now seems faded and pseudopastoral, a poetry of suburbia written by city dwellers celebrating cozy weekends in flower-wreathed country cottages." At the time, though, such poetry was fashionable and respected, and the first collection of poems by these writers, Georgian Poetry, 1911-1912, was extremely successful. "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" was Brooke's contribution to Georgian Poetry, and it remains one of his most popular poems. Grantchester is a small village near Cambridge where Brooke lived for a time after 1909. Brooke, however, wrote the poem later in a cafe in Germany. The poem's nostalgia for an England far away—"And laughs the immortal river still / Under the mill, under the mill / .

. . Stands the Church clock at ten to three / And is there honey still for tea?," as quoted by Delany in The Neo-Pagans—reflects "patriotism and homesickness at their most endearing," writes Eder. After Brooke's death, Henry James wrote that the poem was "booked for immortality." Christopher Hassall, in his introduction to The Prose of Rupert Brooke, offers a perhaps more realistic analysis when he comments that "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester"—though one of Brooke's most personal and original statements—is nonetheless a "lightweight poem." "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" was written in mid-1912, one of the most turbulent periods in Brooke's life. According to Delany, Brooke had experienced a sexual crisis—confusion about homosexual impulses and frustration caused by the rejections of a woman with whom he was in love. In early 1912, these tensions culminated in a nervous breakdown. Brooke spent several months in rehabilitation, during which he was not allowed to write poetry. By summer, though, he had recovered enough to travel to Germany, a trip that marked the beginning of almost three years of constant travel.

In May of 1913, he traveled to the United States, where he spent four months before sailing to the South Pacific. Of the seven months that Brooke stayed in the Pacific, three were spent in Tahiti, where, as Delany states, he wrote "the best of his poems, and [experienced] probably the most unbroken happiness of his life." Several of the poems that Brooke wrote during this period are considered to be among his most effective, including " Tiare Tahiti " and "The Great Lover." Delany notes that the first poem's inspiration was a woman called "Taatamata," whom Brooke met and became intimate with in Tahiti. Not surprisingly, the poem is a love poem, a tribute to an exotic land and carefree love: "Hasten, hand in human hand, / Down the dark, the flowered way, / . . . And in the water's soft caress, / Wash the mind of foolishness, / Mamua, until the day." "The Great Lover" is a list "of the hundred and one everyday things that gave [the poet] joy," writes A. C.

Ward in Twentieth-Century Literature: 1901-1950. "He invested this domestic catalogue with significance and beauty, and turned the commonplace into the strangely new," praises Ward. Similarly, John Lehmann in Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend remarks on "the precise and vivid images with which in The Great Lover [Brooke] enumerates the concrete things that evoke his love in recollection." Despite the apparent happiness that Brooke found in Tahiti, he decided to return to England in the spring of 1914. Within a few months of his return, World War I began. Like most men of his age and class, Brooke immediately volunteered for service in the war. He joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve; the group's first destination was Antwerp, Belgium, where it stayed through the beginning of 1915. The area around Antwerp was not volatile at this time, though, and the Reserve saw no military action during its entire stay in Belgium.

The lull in fighting turned into a fruitful period for Brooke, for it was then that he produced his best-known poetry, the group of five war sonnets titled "Nineteen Fourteen." Written during late 1914, these sonnets express the hopeful idealism and enthusiasm with which Britain entered the war. In the first sonnet, "Peace," Brooke rejoices in the feeling that the war is a welcome relief to a generation for whom life had been empty and void of meaning. As quoted by Bernard Bergonzi in Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, Brooke wrote: "God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, / And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, / With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, / To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, / Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary." In the second sonnet, "Safety," Brooke continues to revel in the coming of war by comparing death to a shelter that protects its refugees from the horrors of life.

The third and fourth sonnets are both titled "The Dead," but it is the second of the two that has enjoyed more popularity and more critical acclaim. In this fourth sonnet, Brooke again paints death as a positive, pristine state. For Brooke, death is like an infinite frost that "leaves a white / Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance, / A width, a shining peace, under the night," as quoted by Eder. Finally, Brooke ends the sonnet sequence with "The Soldier," his most famous and most openly patriotic poem. He imagines his own death, but rather than conveying sadness or fear at such an event, he accepts it as an opportunity to make a noble sacrifice by dying for his country. As quoted by Delany, Brooke wrote: "If I should die, think only this of me, / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England." The "Nineteen Fourteen" sonnets were immediately famous. On Easter Sunday in 1915, the dean of St.

Paul's Cathedral in London, William Ralph Inge, read aloud "The Soldier." Brooke's death three weeks later insured that his name would always be intertwined with the war sonnets, and with "The Soldier" in particular. As A. C. Ward comments, "The Soldier" "became the one poem inseparably linked with Rupert Brooke's name. It is, for all time, his epitaph—beautiful and tranquil." The events surrounding Brooke's death were a significant factor in the success of "Nineteen Fourteen." In February of 1915, Brooke had been ordered to sail to the Dardanelles—a strait between Europe and Turkey—for the Gallipoli campaign that would begin that spring. During the journey, however, Brooke contracted blood poisoning from an insect bite; he died on April 23 on a ship in the Aegean Sea and was buried in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros. Such a death and burial, notes Delany, fueled the myth that the handsome poet had provoked the wrath of angry, jealous gods.

"Rupert's death was first reported as caused by sunstroke," writes Delany, "and had not Phoebus Apollo, the golden-haired god of poetry, struck down Marsyas for boasting that he could sing as well as the god?" Furthermore, Brooke died in a part of the world long associated with another famous English poet, George Gordon , Lord Byron. As Delany says, "Now another Cambridge poet, who had loved to swim in Byron's Pool, had shared Byron's fate." Brooke's death was felt throughout his country; Eder states that "all England mourned the poet-soldier's death." In his tribute to Brooke for the London Times as quoted by Delany, Winston Churchill praised Brooke's "classic symmetry of mind and body." "He was all that one would wish England's noblest sons to be," added Churchill, "in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable." Since the war was still in its early stages, such sentiment could still be cherished. After the staggering number of deaths that the English incurred during the trench warfare of 1916 and 1917, however, such patriotic feeling was viewed—like Brooke's poetry—as foolish and naive.

As John Lehmann comments, "What soldier, who had experienced the meaningless horror and foulness of the Western Front stalemate in 1916 and 1917, could think of it as a place to greet 'as swimmers into cleanness leaping' or as a welcome relief 'from a world grown old and cold and weary'?" A more realistic poetry grew out of the war's latter stages and supplanted Brooke's verse as the most important literary expression of the war. Poets such as Wilfred Owen , Siegfried Sassoon , and Robert Graves captured the terror and tragedy of modern warfare; next to their poetry, Brooke's war sonnets seem "sentimental and unrealistic," notes Lehmann. For several decades after his death Brooke's poetry—though always popular—was dismissed by critics responding both to the consequences of two world wars and to the pessimistic poetry that dominated the age, of which T. S. Eliot 's The Waste Land is the prime example. But more recent critics, while admitting that Brooke's poetry lacks depth, maintain that his verse does have significance.

In Rupert Brooke: The Man and the Poet, Robert Brainard Pearsall does not deny the "slightness in mass and idea" of Brooke's work but avers that "all technical criticism droops before the fact that his verse was lyrical, charming, and companionable." Other critics, including Eder and Edward A. McCourt, argue that Brooke's poetry—especially the "Nineteen Fourteen" sequence—is important as a barometer of England between 1910 and 1915. As Eder states, "Brooke's war sonnets perfectly captured the mood of the moment." Bibliography Poems, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1911 (also see below). (Editor with Edward Marsh, and contributor) Georgian Poetry, 1911-1912 (includes The Old Vicarage, Grantchester), Poetry Bookshop, 1912. Nineteen Fourteen, and Other Poems, Doubleday, 1915 (also see below).

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (includes Poems and Nineteen Fourteen, and Other Poems), introduction by George Edward Woodberry, John Lane, 1915, edited and with a memoir by Edward Marsh, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1918, revised edition, 1942. Lithuania: A Drama in One Act, Chicago Little Theatre, 1915. Letters From America (essays first published in Westminster Gazette and New Statesman), preface by Henry James, Scribner, 1916. John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama (thesis), John Lane, 1916. The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, Faber, 1946, 2nd edition, 1970. Democracy and the Arts (nonfiction), Hart-Davis, 1946. The Prose of Rupert Brooke, edited and introduced by Christopher Hassall, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1956. The Letters of Rupert Brooke, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, Harcourt, 1968.

Rupert Brooke: A Reappraisal and Selection From His Writings, Some Hitherto Unpublished, edited by Timothy Rogers, Barnes & Noble, 1971. Four Poems of Rupert Brooke, Scolar Press (London), 1974. Letters From Rupert Brooke to His Publisher, 1911-1914, Octagon Books, 1975. Rupert Brooke in Canada, edited by Sandra Martin and Roger Hall, PMA Books (Toronto), c. 1978. Song of Love: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier, 1909-1915, edited by Pippa Harris, Crown (New York, NY), 1991. The Irregular Verses of Rupert Brooke, arranged with commentary by Peter Miller, Green Branch (Lechlade, Gloucestershire), 1997. Rupert Brooke and James Strachey: The Hidden Correspondence, 1905-1915, edited by Keith Hale, Yale University Press, 1998.

Further Readings Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War, Constable, 1965. Cheason, Denis, The Cambridgeshire of Rupert Brooke, privately printed, 1980. Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume 6: Modern Writers, 1914-1945, Gale, 1991. de la Mare, Walter, Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination,Sidgwick & Jackson, 1919. Delany, Paul, The Neo-Pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth, Free Press, 1987. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 19: British Poets, 1880-1914, Gale, 1983. Hastings, Michael, The Handsomest Young Man in England: Rupert Brooke, Michael Joseph, 1967. Keynes, Geoffrey, A Bibliography of Rupert Brooke, Hart-Davis, 1959. Laskowski, William E., Rupert Brooke, Twayne (New York, NY), 1994.

Lehmann, John, Rupert Brooke: His Life and His Legend, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980. Pearsall, Robert Brainard, Rupert Brooke: The Man and the Poet, Humanities Press, 1975. Read, Mike, Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke, Mainstream Publishing, 1997. Rogers, Timothy, editor, Rupert Brooke: A Reappraisal and Selection from His Writings, Some Hitherto Unpublished, Barnes & Noble, 1971. Rutherford, Jonathan, Forever England: Reflections on Race, Masculinity, and Empire, Lawrence & Wishart (London), 1997. Stringer, Arthur, Red Wine of Youth: A Life of Rupert Brooke, Bobbs-Merrill, 1948. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 2, 1979; Volume 7, 1982. World Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992. PERIODICALS New York Times Book Review, November 24, 1968.

Times Literary Supplement, August 8, 1918; July 18, 1968; November 27, 1987. Voice Literary Supplement, June, 1988. Discover this poet's context and related poetry, articles, and media. Poems by Rupert Brooke The Soldier - Poems | Academy of American Poets Academy of American Poets The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization. browse poems & poets sign up to receive a new poem-a-day in your inbox sign up poem About this Poem Rupert Brooke is often considered a "Georgian" poet, referring to the 20th century British movement named in honor of King George V.

A soldier during World War I, Brooke died of dysentery and blood poisoning aboard a troop ship. Winston Churchill used the occasion of Brooke's death, as well as his posthumous collection 1914 and Other Poems, to reinforce a recruitment drive. Rupert Brooke , 1887 - 1915 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; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. This poem is in the public domain. This poem is in the public domain.

Rupert Brooke English poet Rupert Brooke wrote in an anti-Victorian style, using rustic themes and subjects such as friendship and love, and his poems reflected the mood in England during the years leading up to World War I.

Question: The 1914 poem ‘The Soldier’ was written by which English poet?
Answer: Rupert Brooke