RUPERT BROOKE: A Biography

In terms of what is presently available, the subtitle could accurately read, The Biography. This is very detailed and perhaps more than the average reader would really care to know about the promising young poet who died during service in WWI without fulfilling the promise. He had every advantage as a poet except maturity. The background was county old family, Rugby and Cambridge. Considering the fact that he was only 27 when he died, he had already a body of work to his credit, albeit an neven one. His letters, which have been collected but never separately published, reveal a selfconscious young man whose saving grace was the ability to laugh at himself. Intense, introspective affinities for two girls that ran concurrently sent him, in the best English poet tradition, abroad to ponder in the South Seas. It was here that his health was weakened to the point where the rigors of WWI could prove fatal. In America, as in England, Brooke's reputation rests on the controversial War Sonnets. Students will appreciate the full section of contemporary reviews that argued the erit of his poetry.