The poet died a century ago, but his vision of a gentle Englishness – articulating something about a nation that lacks a clear idea of itself – has a new importance today
“That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is for ever England”. It is one of the most recognisable passages in English poetry, published in March 1915, and exactly a century ago this week the author of The Soldier was dead – one of the first victims of the Dardanelles campaign.
Rupert Brooke’s death was not exactly heroic. He died from blood poisoning following a mosquito bite in Egypt. But he was by then very famous, lionised by politicians and uncritical in his support for going to war, which he described as “swimmers into cleanness leaping”.
Virginia Woolf witnessed his bizarre trick of diving naked into river and emerging with an erection
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