[Rupert Brooke's Death and Burial, cover] ; UNT Special Collections Artifact Photography

Photograph of the cover of "Rupert Brooke's Death and Burial" by Jeanne Perdriel-Vaissière, held by UNT Special Collections. The light blue cover is worn and wrinkled, the title in orange curled letters in a white rectangle at the top left. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) was the son of a Rugby schoolmaster and attended school at Rugby and later at King’s College of Cambridge University. After completing his education, Brooke continued writing poetry and became one of the founders of the first anthology of Georgian Poetry. Now little studied, it was a dominant poetic movement of the time until it was supplanted by Imagism and the High Modernism of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats. While not as experimental as the Modernists, the Georgian poets did look to free poetry from the ornate language of Victorian verse and employ in its place plain and concrete language. Along with the Georgian poets, Brooke also interacted with members of the influential Bloomsbury Group, which included such prominent writers as Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. When war broke out, Brooke enlisted but never saw combat, instead dying of illness in March 1915 on his way to Gallipoli. Despite this, Brooke became a touchstone for other WWI poets, who dedicated volumes of verse to him, wrote essays celebrating his work, and published memoirs of his life. Rupert Brooke’s most anthologized poetry is often selected to represent a more inspirational and conventional perspective than the soldier poets that follow him. The patriotic sensibility in his most famous poem “The Soldier,” for example, is often contrasted with the disillusionment, horror, and lack of sentimentality of other WWI poets. This is not surprising, considering that Brooke did not see combat, but it has had unfortunate consequences for Brooke’s reputation and much of his best poetry has been neglected. It is important to see the overt nationalism of his self-characterization in “The Soldier” as “A body of England's, breathing English air, / Washed by the rivers, blest by suns ...