author
Rupert Brooke
1887–1915
Best remembered for the haunting sonnet "The Soldier," he became one of the emblematic poetic voices of the First World War. His poems combine youthful charm, lyrical ease, and a striking sense of beauty shadowed by early loss.
4 Audiobooks
The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke
by Rupert Brooke
Letters from America
by Rupert Brooke
Selected Poems
by Rupert Brooke
1914, and Other Poems
by Rupert Brooke
About the author
Born in Rugby, England, in 1887, Rupert Brooke studied at Rugby School and later at King’s College, Cambridge. He quickly became part of a lively literary and intellectual circle, and his early poems won attention for their freshness, wit, and emotional openness.
Brooke is most famous for the sequence 1914 and especially for "The Soldier," a poem that helped shape his public image as the golden young war poet. But his writing was not limited to patriotic verse: poems such as The Great Lover and The Old Vicarage, Grantchester show his gift for warmth, longing, and vivid detail.
In 1915, while serving during the First World War, he died at the age of 27 on his way to the Gallipoli campaign and was buried on the Greek island of Skyros. His early death added to the legend around him, but his reputation endures because the best of his work still feels musical, intimate, and intensely alive.