Reviews John Lehmann, The Strange Destiny of Rupert Brooke. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981. 178 pp. $12.95. In the wake of Rupert Brooke's death in 1915, a commemoration appeared in the Times of London which praised, in the high-flown phrases of funeral rhetoric, the self-sacrifice and noble expression of the young poet who had died of acute blood poisoning on the Dardanelles expedition of World War I. "A voice had become audible," it read, "a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth engaged in this present war, than any other . . . The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and memory remain; but they will linger." The eulogy was unsigned, but it carried the initials of the First Lord of the Admiralty, who at the time was none other than Winston Churchill. Churchill's sentiments triggered a wave of public lamentation for the poet whom W. B. Yeats had called "the most beautiful young man in England." Henry James wept at the news, and in a letter to Lady Ottoline, D. H. Lawrence apotheosized: "I first heard of him as a Greek god . . . Bright Phoebus smote him down. It is all in the saga. O God, O God; it is all too much of a piece: it is like madness." Edward Marsh, the inspiration behind Georgian Poetry 1911-1912 and Brooke's literary executor, concluded his Memoir with the words of Denis Browne in a letter of consolation to Brooke's mother: "the loss is not only yours and ours, but the world's." Rupert Brooke had died, and taken with him the hearts and minds of an entire generation. But by all accounts, Brooke must be considered a minor poet. Per- REVIEWS 351 haps most widely known as a "war poet," his work pales beside that of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg, and seems curiously old-fashioned a decade before the publication of The Waste Land. Yet the Easter preceding his death, Brooke was nearly canonized in St. Paul's Cathedral when Dean Inge compared his sonnet, "The Soldier," to the vision of Isaiah, and ventured to think Brooke would "take rank with our great poets." The spirit Rupert Brooke came to represent overshadowed the man and his work. As a result, Gwen Raverat, a long-time friend, was to complain that one never got the feeling "of his being a human being at all." Drawing on previously unpublished letters, either unavailable at the time of Christopher Hassall's official biography of Brooke or deleted at the discretion of Sir Geoffrey Keynes in his selection of letters, John Lehmann, in The Strange Destiny of Rupert Brooke, sets out to dispel "the magnetic effect" Brooke's charm and good looks had on his contemporaries , "which blinded them so often, not merely to the imperfections of his poetry, but also to the darker side of his character." Lehmann begins his story with the episode he believes to have been the key turning point in Brooke's life, "The Crisis at Lulworth." What follows is a profile, at times sentimental, at others sensational, but always informative, of the man behind the myth of the poet-soldier-hero. "The life of the poet," Brooke prophesied in a manuscript note of 1906, "is made up of tragedies: they begin with an infatuation and end with a sonnet sequence." Born Rupert Chawner Brooke on August 3, 1887, Brooke was the son of a public schoolmaster and a self-contained , independently minded woman who had wished for a daughter instead. Of delicate health and prone to infection, he was noted for his feminine, almost androgynous beauty, and bore a striking resemblance, both in physical constitution and psychological make-up, to his mother . At age nine he discovered poetry while on a visit to his relations, and by ten he was writing verses of his own. Soon after beginning school at Rugby, he became friends with a cousin, James Strachey, and subsequently acquainted with James' elder brother, Lytton. "The markings of glamour," Strachey admitted, "were already there." But to others, Brooke remained strangely aloof. His Rugby friends...