Collected Poems and Letters from America with Photographs and a New Introduction

Rupert Brooke was a man of his time, just not the man that Winston Churchill and the early Brooke Trustees made him out to be. He was delivered a serious disservice by being labeled a "war poet," and was dealt further injustice when critics dismissed his poetry as detached from his life experience. This volume begins with a new introduction by Keith Hale tying Brooke's early poems to his Rugby romantic friendships and discussing Brooke's sexuality in some detail. The Collected Poems and Letters from America are then presented in their entirety together with the original introduction to the letters by Henry James. When Rupert Brooke died of blood poisoning on his way to fight the Turkish forces at Gallipoli in 1915, his friends in England were quick to turn him into a national hero--a patriotic symbol of the many young men of England going to war. That Brooke had recently published five sonnets glorifying patriotic sacrifice did much to promote his legend. That his friends included Winston Churchill, Anthony Asquith, and General Ian Hamilton did even more. To maintain the patriotic legend after the war, Brook’s biography was altered beyond recognition. In this volume, some of that misinformation is corrected, leaving the poems to be read through a new lens.