By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) is often known as a war poet, though he died early on during the conflict and didn’t live to see the sort of combat and conditions that later poets of the First World War, such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg, experienced and wrote so powerfully about.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) In the latest post for our occasional series on neglected poems (see Anna Seward’s brilliant poem ‘An Old Cat’s Dying Soliloquy’ for a previous title in the series), we thought we’d share with you this little-known poem written by a young Welsh poet, David Rhys Geraint Jones, during the … Read more
Facts about the war poets and their poetry, as well as other links between poetry and war
1. The link between poppies and war remembrance dates from the Napoleonic wars, when a writer noted that they flourished over soldiers’ graves. The association would be popularised during the First World War, especially by John McCrae’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields‘ in 1915.
Some quick facts about celebrated poet Rupert Brooke and his short but interesting life
2015 marks the centenary of Rupert Brooke’s death, so we thought we’d offer some interesting facts about the life of one of Britain’s most popular war poets.
1. Rupert Brooke once went skinny-dipping with Virginia Woolf. This happened in Cambridge, where Brooke (1887-1915) was a student. He had won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge after writing a dissertation on Jacobean playwright John Webster and his debt to Elizabethan drama.
2. He was a huge influence on another celebrated war poet. Brooke was something of a hero to John Gillespie Magee, who would write one of the most famous poems of the Second World War, ‘High Flight‘. As well as that sonnet, Magee also wrote a ‘Sonnet to Rupert Brooke’. Magee also won the same poetry prize at Rugby School which Brooke had won some thirty years earlier.