Rupert Brooke

by William E. Laskowski

Patriot or troubled young man with suicidal impulses. Talented poet struggling to find his own voice or unoriginal throwback to a bygone era. Personification of honorable self-sacrifice or of deluded self-indulgence. Rupert Brooke, the lyric poet who eschewed the tenets of modernism coming into vogue at the time of his death in 1915, can nonetheless be viewed as the quintessentially modern man: conflicted, unsure of his identity, psychologically complex. William E. Laskowski accommodates Brooke's many inherent contradictions, as well as the polarized critical views of his brief literary career, in this fair-minded appraisal of Brooke's life and work. Brooke's poetic appeal has always depended on his legend. Directly following his untimely death from blood poisoning while serving during World War I, his life and his poetry were viewed as the embodiment of heroic youth. Brooke's poetry, particularly the war sonnets written in the year before he died, glorified physical adventurousness an