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In Search of God: the Lost Horizon in Rupert Brooke's Poetry

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In Search of God: the Lost Horizon in Rupert Brooke's Poetry In Search of God: The Lost Horizon in Rupert Brooke’s Poetry Mohamed Ahmed Mustafa Al-Laithy (Ph.D.) Assistant Professor of English Al-Imam Muhammad Bin Sad Islamic University Riyadh Saudi Arabia I The British poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) is one of the poets who should be reread and reassessed. Brooke‟s reputation as a poet has been very much apt to doubt and controversies by admirers and detractors alike. Unlike many other poets, Brooke prospered greatly as a poet when he was only twenty. At his time, he was a “poetic…model” (Willdhardt, 49). Unlike the majority of poets, again, shortly after his death at the age of twenty eight, his reputation declined drastically and his poetry was vehemently criticised, attacked and undervalued. This makes of Brooke a unique phenomenon worthy of rereading and reassessment. Indeed, what happened with Brooke as a poet is exactly the opposite of what usually happens with poets during their lifetimes and after their deaths. One can just think of such poets as John Keats (1795-1821)and Alfred Tennyson (1809-92) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) who were severely attacked during their lifetimes, but were explored and championed after their deaths. Ever since the 1920s and the 1930s of the past century, Brooke‟s name as a poet has been diminishing, and almost vanishing, indeed. There seems to have been a general consent among writers and critics of one generation after another either to mention the poet askance, undervalue his poetic contribution, or else to ignore him totally. To give one example, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, one of the most prestigious, referential anthologies in English, mentions nothing at all about Brooke or his poetry. No single poem of Brooke‟s appears in the 1456 pages of the volume, though many other names of less known poets that were Brooke‟s contemporaries, including Ann Spencer (1882-1975), E. J. Pratt (1882-1964), John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) and Conrad Alken (1889-1973), figure in the anthology (Ellmann). Truly enough, as one critic once commented, “Brooke has suffered at the hands of his literary guardians” (Parker, 66). The first full- length biography about Brooke saw light in 1970, i.e. fifty six years after Brooke‟s own death (Parker, 66). One would remember Sir Ifor Evans‟s words about the English poet Robert Burns (1759-96), “So much that is false has been written about Burns, particularly in his own country…that the truth is worth recording” (43). This may, indeed, be more applicable to the “dismissed” Brooke (Stephen, 278) than any other English poet. In his poem „A Letter to a Live Poet‟, Brooke says, “I sometimes think no poetry is read” (Marsh, 324). He was largely true, especially when his own poetry is a case in point. Most of the readers and students of English poetry, whose knowledge of the poet is formed through his one or two poems, “The Soldier” and “Safety”, that are mostly anthologized, come to form an opinion of Brooke as a patriotic, jingoistic, WWI poet, and that is all. This is an oversimplification, even an underestimation of such a considerable poet which, in its turn, outpoured countless criticisms of Brooke‟s poetry. This remarkably shows the extent to which literary patrons, i.e. anthologists, critics and reviewers, can direct and “shape” our vision of one poet or another. Differentiation should be made here between the history of the poet and the poet in the context of history. Unfortunately, critics sacrificed the former to serve certain purposes of the latter. Thus, all of Brooke‟s great poetic tradition has been reduced to the few, last poems the poet wrote just after England‟s announcing of war against Germany in 1914. This is unfair because by that very date, Brooke had already been writing poetry for ten years at least; and, more importantly, he died in the first half of the very next year. In their turn, many critics unjustly contrasted Brooke, the early soldier-poet, who actually never saw war, with the veteran, war-poets Wilfred Owen (1895-1918) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), the former of whom died in the last week before WWI ended in November 1918, while the latter died forty nine years after that war ended (Spurr, 271). Thus, dazzled by the Great War, the greatest event in the century, critics and anthologists overlooked all of Brooke‟s previous poetic production reducing the career of that submerged poet to the few poems he wrote at the beginning of the Great War in 1914. Even then, all of their attention was paid not to the poetic qualities of these poems, but, unjustly again, to the poet‟s idealistic sense of patriotism, heroism and jingoism is expressed in the poems. Brooke is a multifaceted poet. A thorough reading of his poems can open up many of the new vistas invaluable to the poetry of the past century. To give one example, Brooke‟s search for God as his poetry reveals it is worth considering. Search for God has remained, so to speak, the lost horizon in Brooke‟s poetry; and it is time to explore that dimension in his poetry. Of at least forty books and authenticated online sites consulted about Brooke and his poetry, most of which take the twentieth-century poetry to their focal interest, only the book entitled The Georgian Poets, by Rennie Parker, laid a finger on Brooke‟s interest in religion, “Religion was an early concern for Brooke, and on balance he favours pagan Earth and Sun alternatives as exemplified by the pre- Christian world” (69). Even here, the writer focused on the poet‟s being influenced by pagan thoughts; without the idea being developed any further. In its turn, the idea of God was only referred to in passing. It is the aim of this paper, therefore, to unearth one Brooke‟s ardent search for God as revealed in his poetry, an asset essential to a proper appreciation of the poet and one that has remained unique in English poetry. Prior to getting down to Brooke‟s poetry, a short biographical outline is needed for better understanding and evaluation of the poet and his work. Rupert Brooke was born on the 3rd of August 1887, in Rugby, Warwickshire, where his father served as a headmaster at Rugby school. John Donne (1572-1631), John Milton (1608-74), Robert Browning (1812-90), and A[lgernon] C[harles] Swinburne (1837-1909) were among the early literary influences on the poet. From these poets, young Brooke learnt the magic power of words. The formative impact of such poets on Brooke was so profound that they seem sometimes to flow, consciously or unconsciously, into the young poet‟s stream. This is not, after all, any kind of shortcoming or weakness. This is how poets usually take their first steps. Brooke started writing poetry at the age of nine, and had two of his poems, „The Pyramids‟ (1904) and „The Bastille‟ (1905), published by school. In 1911, Brooke published Poems 1911, his first volume of verse; and his only volume published in his lifetime. He was quickly widely recognised and acclaimed by poets and critics of his time. With this debut, Brooke showed prominence as an “extremely promising young poet” (Stephen, 278). Edward Thomas, a prominent poet of the time, expected Brooke to emerge as a poet, “He will not be a little one” (Parker, 72). Brooke became friends with a great many eminent poets and the towering literary figures of the time including Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Sir Edward Marsh (1872-1953), Edward Thomas (1878-1917) and Edmund Blunden (1896-1974). Many of Brooke‟s contemporary fellow poets who were at the time still unknown or scantly recognized by the public, such as Robert Frost (1874-1963), who achieved his breakthrough as a poet through the Georgianism, owe a debt of their being published and, therefore, recognised to Brooke himself (Parker, 3). Brooke will ever be remembered as founder of the Georgian poetic movement (Childs, 30-1), i.e. a school of poets that included, in addition to Brooke himself, Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), W. H. Davies (1871-1940), D. H. Lawrence (1889-1930), Edmund Blunden (1896-1974), and many others. Their main expression was the five Georgian Poetry anthologies edited by Sir Edward Marsh between 1911 and 1922, i.e. during the first half of the reign of King George V (1865-1936), who ruled from 1910 to 1936. The signal sent out by the anthologies was that “the new century created possibility of a new energy and a new direction for English poetry” (Peck, 238). As one critic observed, Georgian poets were able to write “a great deal of interesting verse, but for most part it remains unread” (Peck, 238). In 1912, and after, Brooke had a number of incomplete love relationships, some of which took place through the trip he made to New Zealand in 1913. Such were unhappy love experiences that had a profound impact on him and on his poetry. These included his relationships with the attractive Violet Asquith, the Prime Minister‟s daughter, the actress Cathleen Nesbitt, Katharine (Ka) Cox, Taatamata of Tahiti in addition to many others. Soon after World War I broke out, Brooke enlisted in the Royal Navy Division as a volunteer; then he became a commissioned officer. Brooke died on 23 April 1915, on board the ship destined to the Dardanelles, from blood poisoning as a result of an insect‟s bite on the lip. Despite his early death, Brooke left a considerable literary production, especially poems.
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    BIBLIOGRAPHY Archive sources New York, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature (BC), ‘Berg Coll MSS Thomas, E., 1902-1950’, ‘[Ecstasy] two typescripts (original and carbon) of unpublished essay’. New York, The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature (BC), ‘Berg Coll MSS Thomas, E., 1902-1950’,‘Essay on passion in contemporary fiction, typescript of unpublished essay’. Gloucester, Gloucestershire County Archives (GCA), ‘John Wilton Haines of Hucclecote, poet, botanist and solicitor’, D10828. Published sources Abercrombie, Lascelles. 1912. Deborah: A Play in Three Acts (London: John Lane). Electronic copy online at < archive.org/details/deborahaplayint00abergoog> [accessed 24 September 2014]. 1913. Speculative Dialogues (London: Martin Secker). Electronic copy online at <archive.org/details/ speculativedialo00aber> [accessed 24 September 2014]. 1922. ‘Ryton Firs’, in Georgian Poetry 1920-1922 (London: The Poetry Bookshop). Electronic copy online at <archive.org/stream/georgianpoetry1909640gut/8gp0510.txt> [accessed 24 September 2014]. Aitchinson, James. N.d. ‘Quick Reciprocations: The Real Rhythms of Poetry’. Published online at <www.agendapoetry.co.uk/documents/JamesAitchison-QuickRecipr.pdf> [accessed 13 May 2015]. Alpers, Paul. 1997. What is Pastoral?, paperback edition (Chicago: University of Chic ago Press). Armstrong, Philip. 2008. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (Abingdon: Routledge). Baldick, Chris. 2008. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ebook edition used [accessed 1 June 2015]. Barry, Elaine. 1973. Robert Frost on Writing (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press). Pages 3-53 reproduced online <http://www.frostfriends.org/FFL/Frost%20on%20writing%20%20 Barry/barryessay2.html> [accessed 25 September 2014].
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