Birth of Rupert Brooke

Posted in Anniversary, Famous battles, Literature on Saturday, 24 July 2010

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picture, World War One, trenches, Rupert Brooke, soldier

Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier deals with the death and accomplishments of a soldier during WWI. Illustration by Andrew Howat

3 August marks the anniversary of the birth of Rupert Brooke in 1887. Born in Rugby, Warwickshire, Brooke attended King’s College, Cambridge, and had friends amongst the Bloomsbury group of writers including Virginia Woolf.

Brooke joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1914 and was part of the expeditionary forces in the Mediterranean. He was bitten by a mosquito, developed sepsis and died on 23 April 1915.

His book, 1914 and Other Poems was published in May 1915 and was a best-seller. It included Brooke’s poem “The Soldier”, which contains the famous lines: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.”

More picture relating to Brooke can be found here. A much wider variety of illustrations relating to the Great War can also be found at the Look and Learn picture library.

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