Rupert Brooke
Rupert Chawner Brooke (born August 3, 1887 in Rugby , Warwickshire , England , † April 23, 1915 in Skyros , Aegean ) was an English poet.
Life
Rupert Brooke was the second surviving child of a rugby school teacher . After he was raised by a governess until he was ten, he was enrolled in Hillbrow in 1898 and rugby in September 1901. During this time he made the acquaintance of James Strachey and Duncan Grant , with whom he had long friendships.
1906-1909 he studied at King's College of Cambridge University . In 1908 he was inducted into the Cambridge Apostles and a member (later President) of the Fabian Society . He also founded a debating club called "Carbonari" with Hugh Dalton . During his studies he discovered his great love for English literature and increasingly neglected his actual studies - those of classical philology - so that he only received a second class degree, but won several prizes for poetry.
At this time he had a large circle of friends and acquaintances ( Virginia Woolf , Gerald Shove , George Mallory , Maynard and Geoffrey Keynes , and many more) and was highly regarded by writers such as Henry James . Some of his friends admired his talent, while others were more impressed by his looks, which earned him the nickname "Young Apollo ". William Butler Yeats called Brooke "the best looking man in England".
At the beginning of 1911 he spent three months in Munich , where he lived with the painter Clara Ewald and her son Paul Peter , made the acquaintance of the circle around Stefan George and toyed with the idea of translating Frank Wedekind's works into English.
After his return, he was mainly concerned with his dissertation on John Webster , which should bring him a professorship at King's College. Towards the end of the year his first and only volume of poetry - Poems - was published, which later became a huge success. He wanted to spend New Year's Eve in Dorset with several friends ; When his good friend Katherine Cox confided in him that she had fallen in love with the painter Henry Lamb , he suffered a nervous breakdown, accused the members of the Bloomsbury Group of "conspiring" against him, distanced himself from them and above all stylized Lytton Strachey who allegedly orchestrated this "affair" to his great hate figure. It was during this time that his changeable relationship with Phyllis Gardner began .
He was sent to Cannes , where he was supposed to gain weight and cure himself of his " madness ", as he called himself. In his already unstable state of mind, news reached him from Cambridge that the professorship had gone to someone else. After a month, he arranged a meeting with Katherine Cox in Munich , which Brooke's jealousy and sexual confusion proved disastrous and only made Brooke's condition worse. Brooke then returned to England, only to travel twice to Berlin before the end of the year , where he wrote the short play Lithuania , among other things . He was slowly becoming paranoid, his aversions to "dirt" and aging increased - his behavior fluctuated between that of a disappointed child and that of an arrogant egocentric. In addition, he was very careful to break off almost all "old" friendships and to build up a new circle of friends: the actress Cathleen Nesbitt and the circle of Georgian Poets around Edward Marsh , with whom he published the first Anthology of Georgian Poetry in December 1912 (a huge success). In addition, he was the most important member of the Dymock Poets .
Brooke's accomplished poetry won him many enthusiastic admirers and followers; even Winston Churchill expressed an interest in the young poet, who in the spring of 1913 finally became a professor at King's College. Soon after, he was traveling through Canada and the United States to write travel diaries for the Westminster Gazette, and in 1914 he spent several months in the South Pacific , where he is said to have fathered a daughter in a passionate affair with a Tahitian woman. This story should probably serve as evidence of his heterosexuality, which was of great importance in a time when homosexuality was still a criminal offense. Today, however, it can be considered certain that Brooke was bisexual and was in love with both women and men.
When the First World War broke out , he joined the army and took part in the Antwerp expedition in October 1914, but was never really involved in combat operations. The five sonnets that would later establish his fame were written around Christmas 1914. In February 1915, he went with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in the Mediterranean . On March 11, 1915, the Times Literary Supplement published sonnets IV The Dead and V The Soldier in full, and on Easter Sunday The Soldier was read from the pulpit of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The opening lines often quoted later read:
“If I should die, think only this of me; That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. "
He died on April 23, 1915 on board a French hospital ship of sepsis caused by a mosquito bite on the way to Gallipoli in the port of Skyros Island . That same day, around 11 p.m., he was buried in an olive grove on the island. His grave is still there today.
Although he had appointed Edward Marsh as his administrator, Geoffrey Keynes was appointed by Brooke's mother. Keynes did a lot to preserve the patriotic golden patina in Brooke's name by, among other things, not publishing or censoring selected letters and poems and in doing so, in particular, clearing his bisexuality from his biography.
Brooke's works mostly address his relationships with his friends and are characterized by fear and disgust at aging; On the other hand, an early death is hymnically celebrated and the vision of Peter Pan is honored . Dining-Room Tea and The Old Vicarage, Grantchester are well-known works. He was particularly famous for two of his “war sonnets” ( The Dead and The Soldier ), which meant that Brooke was long regarded as a naive, patriotic poet of mediocre talent, because his portrayal of the First World War in these poems not only does not correspond to reality , but also stands in great contrast to other poems, such as those of Isaac Rosenberg or Charles Sorley . Only recently has his complete works of original poetry been recognized again.
literature
- Harry Rickets: Strange Meetings - The Poets of the Great War, Chatto & Windus, London, 2010. ISBN 978-0-701-17271-8 .
- Alisa Miller: Rupert Brooke in the First World War , Clemson: Clemson University Press [2017], ISBN 978-1-942954-34-7
Web links
- Works by Rupert Brooke in Project Gutenberg
- Literature by and about Rupert Brooke in the catalog of the German National Library
- Painting by Rupert Brooke , oil painting by Clara Ewald, in the National Portrait Gallery , London
- The Rupert Brooke Society
Remarks
- ↑ Charles Sorley's poem When you see Millions of Mouthless Dead can be seen as a deliberate alternative to Brooke's sonnet The Soldier . See Poets of the Great War, entry on Charles Sorley . For an example of a completely different view of war, see z. B. Isaac Rosenberg's poem Dead Man's Dump . See Issac Rosenberg in the First World War Poetry Digital Archive .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Brooke, Rupert |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Brooke, Rupert Chawner (real name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English poet |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 3, 1887 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rugby (Warwickshire) |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 23, 1915 |
| Place of death | Skyros , Aegean Sea |