Brooke made friends among the Bloomsbury group of writers, some of whom admired his talent while others were more impressed by his good looks. Virginia Woolf boasted to Vita Sackville-West of once going skinny-dipping with Brooke in a moonlit pool when they were at Cambridge together.
Brooke belonged to another literary group known as the Georgian Poets and was one of the most important of the Dymock poets, associated with the Gloucestershire village of Dymock where he spent some time before the war. He also lived in the Old Vicarage, Grantchester (a house now occupied by Cambridge chemist Mary Archer and her husband, the novelist Jeffrey Archer).
Brooke suffered from a severe emotional crisis in 1913, caused by sexual confusion and jealousy, resulting in the breakdown of his long relationship with Ka Cox (Katherine Laird Cox). Intrigue by both Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey is said to have played a part in Brooke's nervous collapse and subsequent rehabilitation trips to Germany.
As part of his recuperation Brooke toured the United States and Canada to write travel diaries for the
Westminster Gazette. He took the long way home, sailing across the Pacific and staying some months in the South Seas. Much later it was revealed that he may have fathered a daughter with a Tahitian woman named Taatamata with whom he seems to have enjoyed his most complete emotional relationship. Brooke fell heavily in love several times with both men and women, although his bisexuality was edited out of his life by his first literary executor. Many more people were in love with him. Brooke was romantically involved with the actress Cathleen Nesbitt and was once engaged to Noel Olivier, whom he met while she was a 15-year-old at the progressive Bedales School.
Brooke was an inspiration to poet John Gillespie Magee, Jr., author of the poem "High Flight". Magee idolised Brooke and wrote a poem about him ("Sonnet to Rupert Brooke"). Magee also won the same poetry prize at Rugby School that Brooke had won 34 years prior.
Brooke's most famous collection of poetry, "
1914 & Other Poems" was first published in May 1915, and in testament to his popularity ran through 11 further impressions that year, and by June 1918 had reached its 24th impression; a process undoubtedly fuelled through posthumous interest.
Corner of a Foreign Field
Brooke's accomplished poetry gained many enthusiasts and followers and he was taken up by Edward Marsh who brought him to the attention of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. He was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary Sub-Lieutenant shortly after his 27th birthday and took part in the Royal Naval Division's Antwerp expedition in October 1914. He sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915 but developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He died at 4:46 pm on 23 April 1915 in a French hospital ship moored in a bay off the island of Skyros in the Aegean on his way to battle at Gallipoli. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, he was buried at 11 pm in an olive grove on Skyros, Greece. The site was chosen by his close friend, William Denis Browne, who wrote of Brooke's death:
...I sat with Rupert. At 4 o’clock he became weaker, and at 4.46 he died, with the sun shining all round his cabin, and the cool sea-breeze blowing through the door and the shaded windows. No one could have wished for a quieter or a calmer end than in that lovely bay, shielded by the mountains and fragrant with sage and thyme.
His grave remains there today. Another friend...and war poet...Patrick Shaw-Stewart, also played a prominent role in Brooke's funeral. On 11 November 1985, Brooke was among 16 First World War poets commemorated on a slate monument unveiled in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The inscription on the stone was written by a fellow war poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
Brooke's brother, 2nd Lt. William Alfred Cotterill Brooke, was a member of the 8th Battalion London Regiment (Post Office Rifles) and was killed in action near Le Rutoire Farm on 14 June 1915 aged 24. He is buried in Fosse 7 Military Cemetery (Quality Street), Mazingarbe, Pas de Calais, France. He had only joined the battalion on 25 May. RUPERT BROOKE at www.1914-18.co.uk
In popular culture
The beginning of
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald opens with the quote "... Well this side of Paradise!... There's little comfort in the wise. -Rupert Brooke" This Side of Paradise www.gutenberg.org from Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti final line. Brooke's poem "A Channel Passage," with its vivid description of seasickness, is used for comic effect in a third season episode, "Springtime", of the television series
M*A*S*H. Corporal Radar O'Reilly reads the poem to a nurse he hopes to impress, with surprising results. Radar pronounces the poet's name as "Ruptured Brooke". Part of Brooke's poem "Dust" is used as the lyric for a song by the same title, composed by Danny Kirwan and recorded by Fleetwood Mac on their 1972 album
Bare Trees. Brooke is not credited on the album. On Pink Floyd's war-themed album
The Final Cut, the song "The Gunner's Dream" contains the lyrics "in the space between the heavens and the Corner of Some Foreign Field." Portions of Brooke's poem "The Hill" appear at the beginning of the video for the Pet Shop Boys song "Se a vida é ".
Brooke's poetry is used as character and plot device in the 1981 movie
Making Love and the child ultimately born to Kate Jackson's character "Claire" is named after him.
In the 1970s television series Upstairs, Downstairs, the character of
Lawrence Kirbridge is based largely on Rupert Brooke.
In the 1989 television series Blackadder Goes Forth, in the episode "Major Star", the protagonist Blackadder tells his Lieutenant, George, "If I should die, think only this of me, I'll be back to get you!". This is a parody of the first three lines of Brooke's poem "The Soldier"; "If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England."
He is mentioned briefly in The Catcher in the Rye when Allie and D.B. discuss war poets.
The 2009 novel, The Great Lover by Jill Dawson is based on the life of Rupert Brooke, which mixes fact with fiction. The title is taken from one of Brooke's poems of the same name.
