The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke

About

Brooke's collected poems — including 'The Soldier' ('If I should die, think only this of me') — made him the iconic voice of early World War One patriotism, though his reputation is more complicated than the recruitment-poster mythology suggests. His pre-war poetry shows a sophisticated, sometimes witty, always lyrical sensibility; 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester' is one of the great poems of English pastoral nostalgia. He died of disease on a hospital ship in 1915 at twenty-seven, and the myth of the golden youth sacrificed became one of the war's defining images.