Fellowship at King's College

Year
1912
Biography

Rupert Brooke was born August 3, 1887, at Rugby, Warwickshire, and educated there and at King's College, Cambridge, which he left with a degree in 1909. His first book of verse, Poems, came out in 1911. After studying briefly in Munich in 1912, he returned to live in England at the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, Cambridgeshire. The next year he travelled abroad in Canada, the United States, and the south seas, particularly Taihiti, where he loved a native woman named Taata Mata. At the start of War World I, Brooke joined the Hood Battalion of the British Naval Division and served in the attack on Antwerp. Over the winter he trained at Blandford Camp in Dorsetshire. His five famous war sonnets appeared in New Numbers in early 1915. They sold in such great quantity that the journal exhausted its war supply of paper and closed down. Brooke left by sea with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force for the Dandanelles in early 1915. At the rank of sub-lieutenant, he died of blood poisoning at sea near Scyros on April 23, 1915, and was buried there. His book, 1914 and Other Poems, was published posthumously in 1915. The nation canonized Brooke after his death, but history ultimately chose Wilfred Owen's anti-war lyrics over Brooke's patriotic war sonnets. This reaction has obscured his merits in poems such as "Heaven," "Tiare Tahiti," and "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester."

  • A Bibliography of Rupert Brooke, 3rd edn., comp. Geoffrey Keynes (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1964). Z 8122 .6 K4 1964 Victoria College Library
  • Brooke, Rupert. 1914 & other poems (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915). PR 6003 R4N5 Robarts Library
  • --. "1914", Five sonnets (London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915). PR 6003 R4N5 1915b Robarts Library
  • --. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: with a Memoir (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1918). end B766 A15 1918a Fisher Rare Book Library
  • --. Four poems: The fish, 1911. Grantchester, 1912. The dead, 1914. The soldier, 1914. Drafts and fair copies in the author's hand, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Scolar Press, 1974). end ovs B766 A155 Fisher Rare Book Library
  • --. Poems (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1911). end B766 A155 1911 Fisher Rare Book Library
  • --. Poetical works, 2nd edn., ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1970). PR 6003 R4 1970 Robarts Library
  • --.The Letters of Rupert Brooke, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1968). PR 6003 R4Z515 Robarts Library
  • Caesar, Adrian. “Brooke, Rupert Chawner (1887-1915).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
  • Hassall, Christopher. Rupert Brooke: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1964). PR 6003 R4 Z67 Robarts Library
  • Hastings, Michael. Rupert Brooke (London: Michael Joseph, 1967). A fine book of photographs. PR 6003 R4Z68 Erindale College Library
  • Lehmann, John. Rupert Brooke, his Life and his Legend (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980). PR 6003 R4Z685 Robarts Library
  • New numbers (Ryton, Dymock, Gloucester: Crypt House Press, 1914). PR 500 N47 Robarts Library
  • Rupert Brooke in Canada, ed. Sandra Martin and Roger Hall (Toronto: PMA Books, 1978). FC 74 B78 1978 Robarts Library