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A review by bookwomble
1914 and Other Poems by Rupert Brooke
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.0
1947 Faber edition of Brooke's culturally significant poetry collection, containing his five-sonnet cycle of war poems published within weeks of his death on active duty in WWI. That he died from an infected mosquito bite and never saw combat was less mentioned at the time, and that he died in 1915, before the worst excesses of industrialised War, made his elegiac poems a perfect propaganda memorialisation of the millions of Patriotic Dead. Despite his frequent recourse to English Exceptionalism, there is an undoubted emotional power to his war poems, frequently carved in marble on Cenotaphs and quoted by right-wing nationalistic demagogues, ironically so as Brooke was a member of the socialist Fabian Society for much of his short adult life.
The other poems can be nostalgically evocative, bitterly misogynistic, and overblown by turns. Reading something of his life, relationships and attitudes didn't greatly endear him to me but, at the same time, I feel a compassion for a young man raised in a stultifying atmosphere of late Victorian sexual repression and harshly proscribed class expectations.
Another of those lives lost to War about whose unrealised future contribution to culture we can only mournfully speculate.
Of the articles I read about Brooke, I found this one from The New Yorker most interesting: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-true-story-of-rupert-brooke
The other poems can be nostalgically evocative, bitterly misogynistic, and overblown by turns. Reading something of his life, relationships and attitudes didn't greatly endear him to me but, at the same time, I feel a compassion for a young man raised in a stultifying atmosphere of late Victorian sexual repression and harshly proscribed class expectations.
Another of those lives lost to War about whose unrealised future contribution to culture we can only mournfully speculate.
Of the articles I read about Brooke, I found this one from The New Yorker most interesting: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-true-story-of-rupert-brooke
Content Warnings
Minor: Infidelity, Colonisation, Death, Misogyny, War, and Grief