Rupert Brooke

Rupert Chawner Brooke  was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially "The Soldier". He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England".

Brooke was born at 5 Hillmorton Road, Rugby, Warwickshire, and named after a great-grandfather on his mother's side, Rupert Chawner (1750–1836), a distinguished doctor descended from the regicide Thomas Chaloner. He was the third of four children of William Parker "Willie" Brooke, a schoolmaster (teacher), and Ruth Mary Brooke, née Cotterill, a school matron. Both parents were working at Fettes College in Edinburgh when they met. They married on 18 December 1879. William Parker Brooke had to resign after the couple wed as there was no accommodation there for married masters. The couple then moved to Rugby in Warwickshire where Rupert's father became Master of School Field House at Rugby School a month later. His eldest brother was Richard England "Dick" Brooke (1881–1907), his sister Edith Marjorie Brooke was born in 1885 and died the following year, and his youngest brother was William Alfred Cotterill "Podge" Brooke .

Brooke made friends among the Bloomsbury group of writers, some of whom admired his talent while others were more impressed by his good looks. He also belonged to another literary group known as the Georgian Poets and was one of the most important of the Dymock poets, associated with the Gloucestershire village of Dymock where he spent some time before the war. This group included both Robert Frost and Edward Thomas. He also lived at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, which stimulated one of his best-known poems, named after the house, written with homesickness while in Berlin in 1912. While travelling in Europe he prepared a thesis, entitled "John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama", which earned him a Fellowship at King's College, Cambridge in March 1913.

Brooke suffered a severe emotional crisis in 1912, caused by sexual confusion (he was bisexual) and jealousy, resulting in the breakdown of his long relationship with Ka Cox (Katherine Laird Cox). Brooke's paranoia that Lytton Strachey had schemed to destroy his relationship with Cox by encouraging her to see Henry Lamb precipitated his break with his Bloomsbury group friends and played a part in his nervous collapse and subsequent rehabilitation trips to Germany.

Brooke sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915 but developed pneumococcal sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. French surgeons carried out two operations to drain the abscess but he died of septicaemia at 4:46 pm on 23 April 1915, on the French hospital ship Duguay-Trouin, moored in a bay off the Greek island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea, while on his way to the landings at Gallipoli. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, Brooke was buried at 11 pm in an olive grove on Skyros.