Rupert Brooke (1887–1915)

I had this book for at least ten years before I read it. I picked it up at a used-book store when I was sweeping the place for poetry books. I'm sorry I waited so long. Brooke is the best new (to me) poet I've come across in a long time. I've always known I'd come to the Georgian poets eventually, that true stock of poetry from the good old tradition, the thread that was sadly cut off by the Great War in Europe and the realms of poesy. Modernism ruined the matter and meter of poetry, killed its audience, and sent the true heirs of the English poetic tradition into exile, where they cower together, few and unknown. Any of the nonsense writers of the last century could only dream of doing what Brooke did; no doubt they daren't read him for shame.… (altro)

While known as a war poet most of Brooke's poetry was written prior to the Great War. When war was declared in 1914 he had his first experience of war on the disastrous expedition to Antwerp, spending a few days and nights being shelled in trenches. Early in 1915 he sailed with the Expeditionary Force to the Dardanelles, but died of blood poisoning on a French hospital ship at Scyros, Greece on April 23rd, Saint George's Day. He was buried at night, by torchlight, in an olive grove.

I found much of his words pompous by modern standards, generally glorifying war although he had so little experience of it, yet his voice called to mind the generation of young men who were lost. Although his most famous lines are in "The Soldier", I found this poem particularly appealing:

Song

All suddenly the wind comes soft,
And Spring is here again;
And the hawthorn quickens with buds of green,
And my heart with buds of pain.

My heart all Winter lay so numb,
The earth so dead and frore,
That I never thought the Spring would come,
Or my heart wake any more.

But Winter's broken and earth has woken,
And the small birds cry again;
And the hawthorn hedge puts forth its buds,
And my heart puts forth its pain.”

… (altro)

The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke is a collection of all his poems the editors found fit to print organized from last to first with a collection of fragments from his final journey to Gallipoli in an appendix at the end. The problem with collections ordered this way is that all the good stuff is at the beginning, and the drift towards juvenilia makes for increasingly tiresome reading. Considering that Brooke's best work was done in a few short years before his early death from septicemia on the Mediterranean front of World War I, at times it becomes quite a slog. But Brooke wrote poems worth reading: including his war sonnets, "Grantcester", and some very interesting pieces set in Polynesia. And he deserves to be remembered, as a minor poet, perhaps, but as someone who had genuine poetic talent. It helps that both he and I are fans of the poets of the 90s. At times you can feel a bit of their rhythmic musicality come through his more modern style. So if you are interested in poets who died in World War I or just 20th century poets in general, Brooke is one you will want to bump into, and this volume is a good way to do so.… (altro)