The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke

In 1915, a twenty-seven-year-old poet died of sepsis in a French field hospital, one week before heading to the front lines. The poetry he left behind captures something the war would soon make extinct: a belief in beauty so fierce it feels almost naive now. Brooke's verses celebrate the physical world with an urgency that belies their author's youth, cataloguing in 'The Great Lover' the specific textures of life he refuses to let pass unnoticed. Here are poems about love and cricket and English countryside and the strange weight of being alive in a body that knows it won't last. The collection moves from youthful exuberance toward a harder, clearer light, shadowed always by what Brooke could not have known he was writing about his own imminent absence. For readers who love romantic poetry, who seek the literature of the First World War, or who simply want to encounter a brilliant mind extinguished too soon, these poems still speak across a century with startling immediacy.