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Rupert Brooke

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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"RUPERT BROOKE (1887-1915), English poet, was born at Rugby Aug. 3 1887, and educated at Rugby and King's College, Cambridge, where he afterwards won a fellowship. In 1911 he issued his first volume of Poems. In 1913 he undertook a journey through America and on to Samoa, sending home vivid letters, which recall those of R. L. Stevenson, to a London evening paper; they were published after his death in volume form as Letters from America (1916) with a prefatory appreciation by Henry James. These two books and a second and posthumous volume of poetry 1914 and other Poems, with an essay on John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama (1916), make up his literary output; but its quality and high promise render the greater the loss to English literature by his premature death on active service. He had joined the Naval Brigade very early in the World War, took part in the ill-fated effort to relieve Antwerp, spent the winter in an English camp and went out to Gallipoli in the spring, but on the way there fell ill of blood-poisoning and died at sea in a French hospital ship April 23 1915. He was buried on the island of Lemnos. His Collected Poems, with a prefatory memoir by Edward Marsh, were published in 1918.