The Poetry of Brooke by Rupert Brooke

First published:Poems, 1911; 1914, and Other Poems, 1915; Collected Poems, 1915

Critical Evaluation:

In World War I, when news of Rupert Brooke’s death reached England, John Drinkwater wrote that there had not been a sadder loss to poetry since Shelley’s death, a judgment that seemed borne out by the sale of 58,000 copies of the COLLECTED POEMS by 1921. There was also the legend, rapidly crystallized, of the “great lover,” the handsomest Englishman of his day, famed for his charm. So much had he become the symbol of the youth of England, now decimated by the war, that the strange proposal was made to fix the church clock at Grantchester permanently at “ten to three” as a memorial to his best-loved poem. Yet of this reputation, once so splendid, little remains today, and there are few readers of his poems. The reason is to be found in the radical change that has overtaken English poetry since World War I and sent it along roads far different from those that Rupert Brooke knew.

For the literary historian, 1915 was an interestingly crucial year in English poetry: it saw the publication in England of Brooke’s COLLECTED POEMS and in America of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which appeared in the Chicago magazine, Poetry. So utterly unalike are Brooke’s war sonnets and Eliot’s ironic dramatic monologue that it is as difficult to reconcile their publication in the same year as to remember that Brooke was only a year older than Eliot and that, had it not been for the war, could easily have lived into the 1960’s. Brooke marked the end, as Eliot did the beginning, of a literary age.

The short-lived group known as “the Georgians” was not a poetic school as the term is understood in France; it was a loosely knit group whose members had in common only a reaction against the false medievalism of the late nineteenth century and the artificiality of the 1890’s. It was a return to actuality in subject matter and an employment of the tone and accent of natural speech. The preciocity of the generation of Wilde and Dowson had to be removed from English poetry; the vigor of the common language of men had to be restored, as Wordsworth had found necessary a century earlier. More than anything, there was need for fresh air after the incense-laden atmosphere of the Aesthetic Movement. There was a rediscovery of the beauty of the English countryside and of the sheer joy of living, after the elaborately cultivated world weariness and disillusionment of the 1890’s. The influence of France, which had been dominant in England, was cast off; there was a return to the main stream of English poetry. The Georgians were perhaps the last romantics, as they were also the last to be what we usually think of as typically English.

Brooke went through an early apprentice period during which he was much influenced by the “decadents,” particularly Dowson, an experience natural enough for a man of his generation, before he found his own voice and his own style. The late George Woodberry, in his celebrated essay that serves as an introduction to the COLLECTED POEMS, suggested that Brooke excelled in three aspects of poetry: the dramatic sonnet, the narrative idyl, and the “melange.” By the dramatic sonnet, Woodberry meant a sonnet in which “there is a tragic reversal or its equivalent”; that is, the last line of the poem suddenly reverses the mood that has been carefully built up for thirteen lines. The idyl derives from Milton’s early poems, even to the use of seven and eight-syllable rhyming couplets and glimpses of the English countryside with its flowers and trees and streams. By the “melange” Woodberry meant such poems as “The Great Lover,” in which the poet, having garnered experience, re-creates it in language without particular regard for the value of the experience. The poem is a compilation of physical objects and sensations, held together only by a slender thread of association.

There was also at work on Brooke another influence: that of the Metaphysical poets; and it may be well to remind the present generation that it was not T. S. Eliot alone who rediscovered these figures from the early seventeenth century. Brooke was much interested in them while an undergraduate at Cambridge, for he was an omnivorous reader. His most recent biographer, Christopher Hassall, has aptly pointed out that the greater influence on Brooke’s poetry came from Marvel rather than from Donne, for it was in Marvel’s poetry that gravity becomes transformed into humor and levity into seriousness. This is the tone of many of Brooke’s later poems and particularly of his famous, “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.” Hassall maintains quite rightly that Brooke would have been wiser had he allowed the original title of “The Sentimental Exile” to remain, as it expressed more precisely the intended mood of the poem and would have cleared it of the charge of excessive sentimentality that has been brought against it. Clearly, the gravity is making fun of itself in the contrast between the stiff, regulated world of prewar Germany, symbolized by tulips, and the “unofficial” blooming roses of the Vicarage near Cambridge where Brooke had lived.

The two great experiences in Brooke’s short life were his visit to the South Seas and the World War of 1914. The first of these came in 1913 after a complicated and unhappy love affair which has been called by his biographer “a deep sleep.” The islands of the Pacific, then relatively unspoiled, provided a background, incredibly lush and exuberant, against which the poet’s imagination would operate. That Brooke had always been a nature poet is obvious enough; in Tahiti, nature was so prodigal of its beauty that the pinks and carnations and lilacs of the Old Vicarage seemed tame and colorless. It was in this tropical atmosphere that Brooke wrote what is usually considered to be his finest prewar poem, “Tiare Tahiti,” in which the sensuous world of the South Seas is combined with Platonic “ideas” treated half-playfully, half-seriously, a marriage of tropical images and metaphysical wit.

It is easy to understand the popularity of Brooke’s early poems among young readers of both his own and later generations. They are frankly the work of a young man, deeply in love with life and candidly expressing the joys and the sorrows of his first encounter with the world, its beauty, and its grief. The poems are written in a language that is easy, natural, even colloquial, very beautiful as that term used to be understood. They lost their appeal when the whole attitude of youth changed as one of the results of the shattering explosion of World War I. To the more recent generations of young people, in whose toughened, cynical minds there seems to be little room for youth, these poems have nothing to say.

To read the biography of any Englishman of Brooke’s generation is a haunting experience, for behind all the gaiety and brilliance of Georgian society loomed the dark shadow that was to engulf so many of these doomed young men. Brooke’s brief part in the war is too well known to need repetition. Because of his charm, his good looks, his poetic promise, he soon became a symbol for the youth of England that was being slaughtered in the trenches.

It is a strange irony that the very qualities of Brooke’s poetry that was written during the war are the very ones that have achieved the destruction of his once great reputation. Other war poets, particularly Wilfred Owen, have survived; Brooke has been rejected. The difference is that Brooke’s death came early in the conflict, only eight months after its outbreak, when hopes were still high and when the horror of the trenches of Flanders had not yet turned poetry away from a celebration of heroism to a furious hatred of everything connected with the war. Later, the cynical disillusionment of the post-Armistice years completed the cycle. A public that remembered the appalling slaughter in France and that had read such books as ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT was very different from the reading public of 1915.

And yet—again ironically—Brooke did not glorify war. He accepted and rejoiced in the necessity of dying for his country; he paid tribute to those who had fallen. Further, his war poetry is small in bulk, consisting only of “1914,” a sequence of five sonnets. These were written at Christmas of that year, when the war was but a few months old. For these poems he has been saddled with the reputation of being a “war poet” in the worst sense of the term. A contemporary critic, for example, has called these sonnets “decadent and puerile,” a statement that is both unfair and inaccurate, for it assumes Brooke’s ability to foresee the situation of 1918. What he might have felt, what he might have written, had he survived a few more years or had he seen the eventual battlefields of France, we, of course, cannot know; he might, had he lived, have written poems as bitter as those of Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfrid Owen. But because of his early death, he did become a symbol; and when the postwar reaction set in, he suffered accordingly. The symbol had lost its value.

Brooke’s last years, as was said earlier, were crucial for English poetry. At the very moment when the Georgians were planning their annual anthology, there stood among them the tall figure of T. E. Hulme, who was preparing the dynamite that was to blow their whole poetic practice to bits. Hulme was one of those enigmatic, behind-the-scenes figures who occasionally turn up and are later recognized as having had far more influence than was apparent at the time. He, also, was killed in the war; his own poems, five in number, are undistinguished examples of the Imagist school. But just as Eliot supplied the model that later poetry was to copy all too faithfully, Hulme supplied the intellectual program. It was he who so violently attacked anything that savored of the “romantic” and who prophesied “a period of dry, hard, classical verse.” Hulme and Eliot apparently never met, yet here were two forces working in the same direction. Clearly, the kind of poetry written by the Georgians was doomed; it could not survive the change in the intellectual climate that occurred after the war. Brooke, in spite of the youthful cynicism of some of his early poems, was a romantic in both senses of the word. At times he had premonitions of the type of poetry that is so fashionable today: the use of the deliberately “nonpoetic” in subject and detail. So much has taste changed that it is now hard to realize that his sonnet “A Channel Passage” distressed his friends to the point that he was urged not to publish it. Yet its description of sea sickness is mild enough by modern standards.

By no stretch of the term can Brooke be called a great poet. What he might have become, had he not belonged to that tragic generation of Englishmen, we cannot know. His charm—and he undeniably has poetic charm—lies in a youthful exuberance, a boyishness, a love of life, an ability to laugh at himself. And his poetry has this advantage, noted in Hassall’s recent biography: the Georgians were the last poets to attempt to bridge the gap between poet and reader, to attempt to draw the reader to them. The “dry, hard, classical verse” predicted by Hulme, with its tortured syntax, private references, deliberate obscurity, may present a greater intellectual challenge but it has lost its readers.