The Lost Generation

The beginning of the twentieth century saw the end of the Victorian age in Britain. It brought about a dismal change in attitude towards many values. Verse did not flourish much in Edwardian England. Unfortunately, the First World War swallowed many of the poets who breathed a new Romanticism.One such poet was Rupert Brooke (1887-1915). At school at Rugby, where his father was a master, Brooke distinguished himself as a cricket and soccer player as well as a scholar. At King's College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1906, he was prominent in the Fabian (Socialist) Society and attracted innumerable friends. He studied in Germany and traveled in Italy, but his favourite pastime was rambling in the countryside. He spent a year before the First World War wandering in the United States, Canada, and the South Seas. With the outbreak of World War I, he received a commission in the Royal Navy. He sailed for the Dardanelles, which he never reached. He died of septicemia on a hospital ship off Skyros and was buried in an olive grove on that island.

His early death contributed to his idealized image. His best-known work is the sonnet sequence 1914 that brought him immediate fame. They express idealism in the face of death that is in strong contrast to the later poetry of trench warfare. One of his most popular sonnets follows below (Text 30).