BROOKE, RUPERT (1887-1915), English poet, son of William Parker Brooke and Mary Cotterill, was born at Rugby on Aug. 3, 1887, and educated in his father's House at Rugby school. After winning poetry prizes and playing cricket and foot ball for the school, he went to King's college, Cambridge, with a scholarship in 1906. He played a leading part in university life, helped to found the Marlowe Dramatic Society, became Presi dent of the Fabians, and took a second in Classics; and here, as throughout his life, the charm of personality, in which his remarkable good looks were only one element, gained him in numerable friends. For the next three years he lived mainly at Grantchester, writing poetry and studying the Elizabethan drama, and paid long visits to Munich and Florence in 1911, and Berlin in His Poems were published in December 1911. He won a fellowship in 1913 with a dissertation on John Webster. In May 1913 he started on a year of travel in America and the South seas. In September 1914 he received a commission in the Royal Naval Division, with which he took part in the Antwerp Expedi tion and sailed for the Dardanelles. He died of blood-poisoning in Scyros on April 23, 1915.
He had ambitions for play-writing; though too much must not be built on his only attempt, the one-act melodrama Lithuania, his sense of the theatre, combined with that "sympathetic imagina tion for everybody and everything" which he called "the artist's one duty," were a good equipment. As for prose, his dissertation on Webster shows critical power and industrious scholarship. The Letters from America, full of observation and humour, have many passages of great beauty; and a word must be said of the charm of his intimate letters. In the earlier Poems (1905-08) he is still a boy. He writes with gusto, and a sense of verbal and metrical beauty, neither quite under control ; he is too lavish with the token-coins of poetry; and though there is hardly a poem with out some memorable phrase or passage, the general effect is a little turgid. The later section (1908–ii ) shows a great advance. Though both in his rapture and his disillusion there is still an immaturity of exuberance and bravado, and a few poems are provocatively disgusting, the beauties are more abundant. The Human Body (in which the influence of his favourite poet Donne shows most clearly) and two or three sonnets are completely successful ; and Diningroom Tea, with its curiously concrete rendering of an elusive experience, is one of his finest pieces. Next came Grantchester (1912) . This lovely poem, in its combination of tenderness and whimsicality, both steeped in the essence of poetry, is the first perfect example of that mingling of humour and beauty which is perhaps his chief distinguishing mark. Written in Germany, it is also the first expression of his deep love for England. In the best of the poems written on his travels he steps out as a master of his craft; the sonnets Clouds and Psychical Research, with the exquisite Tiare Tahiti, mark the highest level of his accomplishment. The publication of 1914, almost coinciding with the news of his death, won him immediate fame. Written in the chivalrous ardour of the first moment, the sonnets are in strong contrast with the later poetry of trench warfare; and nothing better has been said about their historical aspect than the words of Winston Churchill: "A voice had be come audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms than any other—more able to express their thoughts of self-surrender, and carry comfort to those who watched them so intently from afar." Finally, the fragments written on his last voyage, in their union of profound feeling with the perfection of phrase and movement, hold more surely than anything else he wrote the promise of a great poet. (E. MAR.) .)