cover image Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke

Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke

Mike Read. Trafalgar Square Publishing, $35 (256pp) ISBN 978-1-85158-995-1

""I am twenty-six years old [today],"" Brooke wrote to a girlfriend, ""And I've done so little."" It was August 3, 1913, a year and a day before England would enter WWI. A young Apollo to his generation, Brooke would have only one more birthday, dying of septicemia en route to Gallipoli. His Byronic personality and looks, and his early death, gave his thin literary achievement a sentimental appeal that overshadowed that of more substantial wartime poets. Read's 22nd book (he is also an English broadcaster and composer) cannot replace Christopher Hassell's 1964 life, the standard work before it went out of print. Read exposes a brief Tahitian romance that resulted in an unacknowledged child, but otherwise this biography is inadequately researched, repetitious and padded with local history and irrelevant asides. Its wooden prose includes such sentences as this: ""He eventually would live there, but that was in the future."" Seventy-one of Brooke's poems appear, mostly in full; among them is the famous ""The Solider,"" which prophesies his burial in ""some corner of a foreign field""--it would be the Greek island of Skyros--that would become ""forever England."" Illustrations. (June)