Rupert Brooke in the First World War

This cultural biography makes extensive use of archival sources to show how people who knew Brooke, or thought they knew him through his poetry and public image, drew on the poet-soldier to make sense of their own experiences of the war, both in the trenches and on the home front. Going beyond Brooke’s own life and famously romantic death, it retraces the evolution of his reputation in cultural imagination as forged by a network of major political and literary figures of the period including Winston Churchill, Edward Marsh, Virginia Woolf, Theodore Roosevelt, T. S. Eliot, Siegfried Sassoon, and Henry James. This book will appear during a period of commemorations and special events marking the centenary of WWI.