Rupert Brooke in the First World War [Paperback]

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.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. Miller's succinct study both evokes and deconstructs the myth of 'England's poet-soldier'. Her narrative is supported and enlivened by relevant quotations and illustrations ... Students and scholars of either the life and poetry of Rupert Brooke or World War I will find Alisa Miller's book to be discerning and instructive.
Yann Tholoniat, Michigan War Studies Review

Miller is an expert guide to the journalistic efflorescence of war writing... Miller's book is a valuable reminder of his [Brooke's] continuing significance for students of the period.
Roger Ebbatson, Dymock Poets and Friends

Miller states in conclusion that her book 'is an attempt to assess and understand a particular cult figure in the context that created him. And it tries to collate and consider the language, people, and institutions that encouraged them - and him - to be read in the way that they were' (p. 225). She succeeds admirably in this task, and her book should be of interest to anyone intl“8