Rupert Brooke was already well-known before the First World War, but it was war that made him famous.
His fame endures today, so much so that the fact that his childhood home is up for sale has sparked plenty of interest. And that fame, 111 years after his death, is all the more extraordinary considering that his most famous work is probably the most divisive poem written during the entire conflict.
Even those who don't recall the name will know the lines:
If I should die, think only this of me,
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
These words, the opening lines of 'The Soldier', were part of Brooke's collection of five poems published just before Christmas 1914. They caused something of a sensation in the days when poetry cut into the collective consciousness in a way that's hard to appreciate today.
With the benefit of hindsight it's easy to see his works as misty-eyed idealism, a hopelessly naive viewpoint that contrasts with the bitter, despairing and cynical work of the poets who made it further through the War — Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon being prime examples.
At the time, though, Brooke caught the public mood of bravery, optimism, sacrifice, stoicism and duty that underpinned the early days of the Great War, when long queues were still forming at the enlistment offices, and before the true horror of what was unfolding in the fields of France and Belgium became clear. His lines were cited widely, held up as an inspirational example, and even read out at St Paul's Cathedral in the Easter service in April 1915.
Two weeks later, Brooke was dead.
Rupert Brooke's life had begun on August 3, 1887, at No 5, HIllmorton Road in Rugby, the Warwickshire town where his father, William Parker Brooke, taught Classics at Rugby School. He was the middle of three brothers, though he'd also had an older sister who died in infancy.
The house, then as now, is charming. It sits at the end of a small terrace of fine Victorian houses, in an area of large, similarly-aged villas close to the centre of the town. The school buildings are within a few moments of the front door.
With four bedrooms and three bathrooms there's plenty of space — almost 3,000sq ft of it — and the house has been kept up beautifully while retaining its character. Thus, the encaustic tiled floor in the hallway and ornate fireplaces that Brooke and his family would have known are still in place.
The town centre location and subsequent building mean that there's not much in the way of garden — just a small patch of lawn and an outdoor seating area — but there's parking for four cars at the back of the house.
Brooke spent his entire childhood in Rugby, attending first the Hillbrow prep school and then going on to Rugby as a student — excelling at rugby, cricket and, of course, poetry — before heading for Cambridge in 1906.
There, he flourished. Charming, clever, athletic and dashing — the poet WB Years dubbed him 'the handsomest man in England — life came to him easily. He became president of the Fabian society, was friends with everyone from Yeats and Churchill to Virginia Woolf to John Maynard Keynes, and had a string of romantic relationships with both men and women. He also travelled widely, his poetry, while not regarded as groundbreaking, at least earning him a reputation as one of the up-and-coming stars of the 'Georgian poets'.
Love and nature abound in those early poems, and seems to have enjoyed an idyllic life, spending time in the countryside, skinny dipping in streams and rivers (including at least once with Woolf) , and 'celebrating cozy weekends in flower-wreathed country cottages' in the words of his biographer Dorothy Eder as quoted by the Poetry Foundation. It's not hard to see where Brooke's idealised image of England came from; he lived it at the peak of his powers in his 20s.
The spell didn't last forever. A series of bad turns — especially in his love life — precipitated a mental breakdown, which prompted him to go abroad from 1912 until 1914, travelling as far as Tahiti, before returning a few months before the beginning of the war.
Brooke joined the Navy not long after the declaration, with Winston Churchill — then First Lord of the Admiralty — securing the poet a commission as an officer in the Royal Naval Division, a hastily-set-up infantry arm of the Navy. Initially deployed to help in the evacuation of Antwerp, Brooke had seen no action by the time The Soldier was written, though this and his other poems clearly suggest that he seemed only too happy to be involved. 'God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,' he wrote in a poem called Peace. 'With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, / To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, / Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.' This fatalistic idealism seems the very opposite of the wasteful and endlessly tragic war of later work such as Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth, with its descriptions of soldiers 'who die as cattle'.
At the beginning of 1915, Churchill decided to deploy the Royal Naval Division to Gallipoli. Brooke never made it: before even reaching the Dardanelles, he was bitten by an insect, the wound turned to septicaemia, and he died aged 27 on April 23.
Churchill himself contributed to the obituary in The Times: 'This life has closed at the moment when it seemed to have reached its springtime,' he wrote. 'A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other... The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and the memory remain; but they will linger.' Prophetic words.
His corner of a foreign field wasn't in France or Belgium, but on the Greek island of Skyros, where his comrades buried him before moving on to Gallipoli. But there's also in Rugby a corner of an English field that is forever Rupert Brooke's old house.
Rupert Brooke's childhood home is for sale through Knight Frank at £775,000 — see more details.