This chapter considers the network of poets orientated around the Georgian Poetry publications that appeared in a series from 1912 to 1922, edited by the influential literary and artistic champion Edward Marsh. It discusses the innovations advanced by contributing writers even as they consciously adhered to a lyric inheritance that stressed continuity over rupture. With some exceptions, it argues that these poets relied on a pastoral palate to articulate complex emotional and sensical realities while they contended – implicitly and, more rarely, explicitly – with the jarring physical and psychological assaults of the First World War. Finally, it addresses the ways in which the editors and established contributors used the publication as a platform to promote emerging and important literary voices, including the likes of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg.

This chapter argues that, during the First World War, personal, partial, emotive and literary practices were fundamental to how transatlantic discourses about the war were managed, maintained, and ultimately resolved in favor of the Anglo-American alliance. It examines the different ways writers - for example, Rupert Brooke, John Masefield, Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Robert Frost - were mobilized by institutions like Wellington House, universities, newspapers and publishers. It considers writers’ and poets’ contributions to overlapping official and unofficial propaganda networks, and how this cultural exchange worked to “sell” particular interpretations and experiences of the conflict to reading publics.

Throughout the First World War, official and unofficial propagandists alike stressed the idea of cultural superiority as justification of war in defence of ‘Civilisation’. In 1916, official German propagandists released a poster offering portraits of great artists alongside comparative illustrations of social welfare as a refutation of Allied charges of ‘barbarism’ in conquered territories. In London, the ‘most effective series of recruitment posters’ quoted lines of William Shakespeare on war as a reflection of the tradition of poetry, language, and resolve. Spearheading British propaganda efforts in the early years of the war, Charles Masterman, at Lloyd George's behest, enlisted the services of various writers and poets for Wellington House, and saw that their endorsement of the war was published not just in England but on the front page of the New York Times. The American poet-soldier Alan Seeger, who joined the French Foreign Legion at the outbreak of the war, from 1915 until his death in 1916 published excerpts from his diary as well as occasional editorials urging American intervention. Writing from the trenches at Aisne, he presented his case on the grounds of the cultural and moral superiority of the Allied cause, invoking the universal duty to march ‘forth with haste’. The Times sent Robert Bridges to report on factory conditions: his piece was consciously poetic, as was Rudyard Kipling's ‘The Battle of Jutland’, when describing the plight of British ships under attack. It can even be argued that the persistent appeal of Brooke's War Sonnets to wartime readers was at least in part down to their echoing the rhetoric of war correspondents, who saw it as their duty to explain the war in aesthetic – as well as political and logistical – terms to the readership.

From its start, writers and public figures defined, recast, expanded, and narrowed the war's philosophical terrain. Journalists and editors responded to war news by fitting their copy to the accepted ideals of justification, which fell under the consensus principle established in August 1914: the actions of the Triple Alliance nations, and in particular German aggression, meant that the Allies held the moral imperative.

Although the balance was grossly skewed in favour of praise, even during the war reactions to the popular, abstracted ideal of Brooke as ‘England's Poet-Soldier’ and ‘the laureate of the war he never really saw’ were not universally positive. It was almost impossible, at least in public, to criticise him personally. He had fallen out with a number of individuals in the years and months preceding the war, particularly in Bloomsbury circles. But when he died, most who had known him personally, or in a professional, literary capacity, were genuinely sorry: everyone, whatever stance they took on the war, read his death as tragic.

Still, as Brooke's very public death gave way to an even greater public fashioning of his posthumous reputation, some took it upon themselves to voice their scepticism. Reacting as much to the process through which his memory was sanctified as to the sheer number of people who felt empowered to join in the defining and distilling of his life's worth, Cambridge friends first began to push back against the myth as early as May 1915. Over the course of the war, a broader coalition of critics called into question his authorial reputation, even as they were careful to acknowledge his personal sacrifice.

Ironically, even as he introduced Brooke to a wider reading public, Dean Inge was one of the first to offer up a tentative criticism of elements of ‘The Soldier’ in 1915. His religious reading of the poem stressed that it did not go far enough in achieving a self-surrender, wherein the individual completely relinquished his body to reward the soul. There could be no holding back, no overt attachment to material and physical delights, because this was both the ideal inspired by Christ and the behaviour required in wartime.

Charles Sorley had similar reservations about the poet-soldier's philosophical and stylistic approach to the War Sonnets. He appreciated Brooke's technical abilities as a poet, but took issue with the ‘sentimental attitude’ of the poems and what he viewed as their insularity and self-satisfaction: ‘They’, the soldiers of ‘The Dead’, had not given up ‘anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but … the essence of these things had been endangered by circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to recapture them’.

Brooke might be increasingly sure of his moral resolve, but he still had to find a way into the war. His path to becoming an officer would meander for a little while longer. Brooke, like many readers in England and around the world, was impressed by the romantic accounts of Belgian and French heroism in the war's opening weeks. He would have read of the gallant (and desperate) halting of the German Army at the Battle of the Marne. This was grim and heady stuff: Paris menaced, and the famous taxis ferrying troops up the line to defend the city. The war, for all the horror of the appalling casualty figures of its opening weeks, seemed romantic, desperate, and modern, particularly as it was presented in the Allied press, which painted a picture of men willing to go all out – à outrance – to defend their homes, families, and civilisation.

Less gloriously, but no less bravely, the professional British Expeditionary Force (BEF) faced the numerically superior Germans as it made its long, dusty, and bloody-footed retreat from Mons; newspapers – and in particular The Times dispatch on 30 August – detailing the retreat aided in the great push for volunteers that ultimately fed Kitchener's new army. Meanwhile, in the East, the Russians, rag-tag but voluminous, advanced into Germany. Across Europe the armies left behind them the swelling bodies of dead comrades and dazed masses of refugees. Brooke thought of accompanying his friend Jacques Raverat to France under the pretence of helping to garner crops; he reasoned that he might join up with some sort of informal military expedition there. Like many potential volunteers in August and September 1914, he increasingly feared that he might miss his chance to see direct action, and that all the best stories, even the tragic ones, might already have been told.

Although it remained appealing, Brooke quickly turned from his first preference of becoming a journalist. Given their limited access to battlefields, which professional armies initially intended to be kept free of civilian observers, war correspondents were well supplied. While experienced and already deployed correspondents were clamouring to cover the war in whatever capacity they could, Brooke was not already in convenient residence abroad with access to first-hand accounts, and possessed no particularly exceptional language skills or familiarity with the places under fire.

General Sir Ian Hamilton's dramatic comment, that after Brooke's death ‘The rest is silence’, proved incorrect, as the memorialising commenced immediately: it quickly took on a significant symbolic value. Reviews of the War Sonnets, and the incorporation of ‘The Soldier’ into the Easter sermon at St Paul's were one thing, but the death of the poet-soldier in April 1915 would come to represent something beyond individual tragedy. The genre that first raised Brooke and his poems in the public consciousness was the obituary.

The obituary was already a prominent, recognised literary genre in 1915. In outlining major life achievements, it also reaffirmed consensus social values. It developed out of the tradition of private death notices designed to announce the commencement of mourning. Numbers rose substantially in parallel with expanded literacy rates and the rise of newspapers. In wartime Britain, social historians have pointed out that the encounter with the death of large numbers of young men was at odds with progress in mortality rates made in the late Victorian and Georgian periods. Death – from injury, accident, and illness – once a private and fairly regular element of family life, was again, shockingly, claiming large numbers of young men and women. The genre both informed and depended on a larger cultural shift relating to death as a social experience, as rituals surrounding the death of royalty and politicians evolved from private affairs to public pageants. Death was (for lack of a better word) accessible to all, and communal participation, either organised or spontaneous, substantiated awareness of the national community. The obituary functioned not necessarily in order to emphasise ideals important to the deceased or to his or her family, but instead to present a valuation of the individual's cultural contribution. This was particularly important during wartime, and was in great demand given the sudden preponderance of death.

This meant that from 1914 to 1918 the war forced the government and the public to develop ways of coping with death in practical and symbolic ways. Charles Masterman later observed that while at Wellington House he had ‘only been able to write occasional articles … for the most part obituaries for friends’.

Brooke's emergence as the national poet from 1915 to 1918 was not accidental. His personal approach towards writing poetry in a time of war, born of a period of self-mobilisation, crystallised in the months leading up to his death during which time he positioned himself – to the extent that he could control his own circumstances – to become ‘England's Poet-Soldier’. Throughout his short life, he also maintained and expanded an influential web of acquaintances. For these literary and political patrons and champions, Brooke's accessible poetry and timely if tragic death allowed them to place him before the reading public, almost ready-made, cast in the role of the perfectly self-surrendering fulfilment of his own poetic vision.1 They did so in the obituaries of April and May 1915, which in turn were syndicated, recast, and expanded upon for new audiences in a variety of publications and formats throughout the war. The opportunistic way in which Brooke was promoted does not, however, negate the genuine grief – felt to varying degrees depending on the proximity to the man as opposed to the figure – expressed at the death of an individual who was in many cases a friend or protégé as well as a saleable patriotic entity. As Henry James midway through the war observed: ‘His place is now very high & very safe – even though one walks round and round it with the aching soreness of having to take the monument for the man’.

The language and discourse that settled on and around the poetsoldier fixed him as a standard for the war readership, including other would-be writers and poet-soldiers, who read his poems and the myriad articles and advertisements, reacted to their language and sentiments, and in some cases were inspired to compose their own variations on a theme.

Once the Gallipoli invasion was a known fact in the Hood Battalion in January 1915, Brooke expressed pleasure at the destination, adopting the trope of crusader in his letters to friends. Again he was better informed than most soldiers in his position, as Violet Asquith had leaked that ‘Ian Hamilton is going to command you’. She claimed that this was her father the Prime Minister's idea, and that Lord Kitchener had instead suggested alternatives, but warned that this was another ‘deadly secret’.

Brooke's one reservation was that he would be far away from what he considered to be the war's main theatre. Most of his training in England had been undertaken with French and Belgian trenches in mind. All of his ideological attempts to contextualise his and Britain's participation in the war based themselves not on the Imperial, but on proximate, European concerns, namely on the much-publicised accounts of ethical and cultural outrages in Belgium, the excessive military force against civilians, and sympathy with France as an invaded and occupied nation at the mercy of ‘Prussian militarism’. Brooke accepted the common motif of defence of England being defence of ‘Civilisation’, and subsequently wrote in semi-seriousness to Jacques Raverat that, ‘I shouldn't like to get killed in Turkey. I don't mind killing Turks to begin with, but I'd like to puncture a German, before I finish’.

He alleviated these concerns through a series of practical reassurances. In contrast to the bland stasis of camp, it was thrilling finally to be moving somewhere. He tried to prepare by learning a little practical Greek, practising phrases like ‘How far …?’, ‘sugar’, ‘cup’, ‘tea’, and statements anticipating discussions of ‘After … the end of the war’. Despite his desire to experience battle, he was not above admitting some (illfounded, as it turned out) relief at his posting; he wrote comfortingly to Cox, at least ‘it's [Gallipoli] not as dangerous as France’.

During July and August 1914, people around the world watched apprehensively as the global crisis that would become the First World War took shape. While to some it was clear almost immediately that the assassinations of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo would provide the spark in the tinderbox that many observers had been expecting for years, it took weeks for the framework to emerge, for alliances to settle, and for the war to become a fact.

More than most, Brooke had access to well-placed individuals – Edward Marsh, and Violet and Cynthia Asquith – with some insights: ‘Everyone in the governing classes seems to think we shall be at war’. Friends with any real political responsibility were run off their feet, meaning that Brooke saw out the final days of July in a state of heightened and semi-ignorant anticipation. Rumours spread quickly and were consumed voraciously by a tense citizenry. In cities, towns, and villages nervous crowds gathered, waiting to hear the news as telegrams flashed between European ministries. Marsh, who was virtually sleeping at his desk, was too busy even to write. He eventually stole a moment to send a message to Brooke, noting wryly that this silence ‘must have brought the reality of war home to you more than anything else’.

On 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia, and the mood shifted. On the same day Brooke wrote to Jacques Raverat, wondering ‘what can one do if there's war?’ On 4 August, Britain declared war. He later described the moment he, and fellow Londoners, found out for certain that the period of speculation was over:

Like many public schoolboys with literary ambitions, Rupert Brooke's poetic mentors shifted over time in response to his passions and tastes. As an adolescent, Brooke preferred the Victorians, particularly Browning. At 18, the list included Rossetti, Swinburne, Dowson, and Wilde. At Cambridge, his interests ran to the Elizabethans, and Geoffrey Keynes, who had been a student at Rugby with Brooke, recalled the fashionable and somewhat affected young poet being given a volume of Baudelaire in 1906.

Keynes, who served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the war, developing a portable blood transfusion device, later became a great champion of Brooke's. He felt that by the end of Brooke's university years, a combination of awakened political awareness and the maturation of his emotional life meant that the ephemeral literary influences faded. From one who ‘affected to think Tennyson old-fashioned’ and whose ‘enthusiasms were the natural tastes of his age’ emerged a poet of ‘genuine feeling’, so that in the end his later poems were ‘inspired by his own experiences, though few of his friends knew of the heights and the depths of the emotional crisis through which he passed’.

This emphasis on authenticity, on reaction and observation free from affectation or false influence would become a point of praise, as well as a bone of contention, for many readers of Brooke's poetry – and in particular the sequence of poems collected as the War Sonnets – from 1915 onwards. For many readers, these verses, and especially ‘The Soldier’, ‘The Dead’, and ‘Peace’, in descending order of popularity, rang with the authenticity of the enthusiastic volunteer demonstrating the purest patriotism. They represented an update of the work of canonical poets like Byron, Tennyson, and Kipling, speaking to, and for, a new generation. Brooke and his poems were an affirmation of the ‘English’ values of honour, aestheticised youth and friendship and, ultimately, self-sacrifice. They were also a product of Brooke's personal experience of the war, as well as what he perceived to be general ‘undercurrent[s] of feeling’, captured and fixed in verse, through which he strove towards Coleridge's ideal of the ‘great poet’.

In terms of narrative expediency and proximity to the anticipated test, by joining the Royal Naval Division, Brooke initially got exactly what he wanted: immediate active service. He was scarcely trained when he was sent to Antwerp on 4 October as part of an expedition that later garnered for Winston Churchill, its architect and commander, a great deal of criticism. For Brooke, his early knowledge of the deployment represented the first in a line of ‘dead secrets’ shared with his friends Jacques Raverat, Cathleen Nesbitt, Katherine Cox, and his mother in the months leading up to the Division's departure for Gallipoli. This bit of knowledge was gleaned from a lunch at the Admiralty on 23 September.

His relatively informed position again marked him out as not necessarily a singular, but a privileged case. Brooke's ‘secrets’ were in essence rumours, although better informed than most, helping him to make sense of his war. One insight that emerges from the study of letters, war diaries, and memoirs from the First World War, and probably any war, is that these writings impose a narrative structure on to situations that are, in actual experience, bewildering. Brooke's reading and writing about the war also served to raise his expectations of what was to come, and to heighten his sense of proximity to the war without physically drawing him nearer to it. In early October, he was impatient to cross the line, to experience a rite of passage wherein ‘the initiate ultimately leaves the liminal state and is reintroduced to the community with an altered and superior status’.

The overall aim of the Antwerp expedition centred on plans devised as early as 1905, with a purpose that was threefold: establish a base through which the navy could easily supply the army from Britain; attack a portion of the German flank that was vulnerable to harassment by a small force; and maintain autonomy from a rival command, something less likely if operating from a French, as opposed to a Belgian, port. Both General Joffre in France and Lord Kitchener refused to send troops, while Churchill was keen on engaging directly in the fight. Brooke's Anson Battalion travelled across the Channel, landed, marched, and took up a position near the village of Vienne Dieu. The weather was warm and dry.

We are accustomed to thinking of early twentieth-century publishing and other media providing a one-way means of exchange between established writers and critics and their audiences. In this model, readers consume what they receive, which in turn shapes their mental and linguistic landscapes: ‘the knowledge, the beliefs, the understanding, the opinions, the sense of identity, the loyalties, the moral values, the sensibility, the memories, the dreams, and therefore, ultimately, the actions of men, women, and children’. With respect to coverage of Brooke, much of what appeared in national newspapers and periodicals was provided by established writers and critics, but in some instances reactions to their work went beyond a passive absorption. Amongst different reading ‘constituencies’, consideration and discussion initially took place privately, and sometimes remained there, implicitly influencing future poetic responses as witnesses to the development of the ideal of the poet-soldier as it emerged reflected on its power and relevance to their experiences of the war. In other instances, responses became public, reaching new constituencies as the reading nation found ways to interact with and contribute to the Brooke myth.

Such responses from the public also show the extent to which the War Sonnets, and in particular ‘The Soldier’, had become bona fide wartime ‘hits’. They were so recognisable, so replete with culturally consistent, accessible themes and images that they created what has been identified by economists as a ‘multiplier effect’. The poems, and in more abstract ways the ideals associated with the myth of the poet-soldier, inspired – to use a more modern phrase – their own spin-offs.

During the war patriotism was no longer necessarily equated with a rough, aggressive, overtly masculine ideal of violence and killing. Instead, the civilian soldier, whose most definite act was volunteering, became an increasingly sanctified trope as the war turned attritional, testing mental, physical, and material endurance. Both soldiers and civilians, including men and women of all ages, came to view their contributions to the war as forms of ‘military service’ even as they also came to view themselves – to different degrees – as ‘victims’ of the conflict.

Tribute poems were a particularly accessible way for members of the public to express their appreciation for Brooke as the poet-soldier, and for men-in-arms more generally.

Rupert Brook's reputation during the war worked on the principle that the poet-soldier fitted within a cultural and literary continuum, and a common English heritage. This could be read as intensely nationalist or even localist in expression, but in practice those promoting the ideals associated with the poet-soldier did so in a manner designed to appeal to broad audiences. The nature of Brooke's reputation, and the near universal allure of the ideals associated with the myth that emerged during the war, made him relatively easy to ‘sell’ – literally and figuratively – to would-be patrons, critics, and readers abroad.

He was already recognised by figures with international reputations, from Emile Verhaeren to Henry James. In 1916, Edith Wharton chose to include Brooke's poem ‘The Dance, A Song’ in her Book of the Homeless, which was designed to raise money for hostels for Belgian refugees. This was not a war poem, but instead conjured up memories of a dusky pre-war world: ‘Following where your feet have gone, / Stirs dust of old dreams there’. It appeared on page four of the volume, well ahead of more established figures including Maurice Barrès, John Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, General Joffre, and Henry James. Theodore Roosevelt, furious at United States neutrality in the war, provided the Introduction to the volume, including the following lines, which attacked the apathy of many who ignored the ‘cause of humanity’: ‘Nothing that can now be done by the civilized world, even if the neutral nations of the civilized world should at last wake up to the performance of the duty they have so shamefully failed to perform, can undo the dreadful wrong of which these unhappy children, these old men and women, have been the victims’. Wherever he was introduced, and in whatever context, Brooke was offered as one he had given his all in a common cause.

The manner in which different national presses chose to report on Rupert Brooke as ‘England's Poet-Soldier’ responded to particular local contexts; however, the language deployed, and the themes identified, remained largely consistent with their English counterparts. The exporting of Brooke relied on existing infrastructure that supported the sharing of information between individuals and governments, which became even more important in times of war as the belligerent nations worked to influence international opinion.

Soldiers – and within this group would-be poet-soldiers – formed another of the reading ‘constituencies’, and one keenly invested in the developing Brooke myth. The more extreme, jingoistic expressions of wartime patriotism were not always welcomed by soldiers on active duty, as ‘celebration and civilian commemoration unwittingly highlighted and to some extent deepened the divide between soldiers and non-combatants’. During the war few viewed Brooke's War Sonnets and the responses his death inspired in the press as falling into this category. Soldiers and civilians alike accepted and in some cases adopted the language expressed by ‘England's Poet-Soldier’ and reiterated by his many established and emerging champions, which worked to elevate the sacrifices of the war dead above the dayto- day degradations of a dirty, extended campaign: ‘There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, / But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold’. The Brooke myth mediated between soldiers and civilians – and poet-soldiers and their potential readerships – locating ideals common to all: ‘There was never a moment of the war … when, to the majority of Englishman, including those in the trenches, his rhetoric did not seem the most appropriate way of speaking and writing about the ideals of war’.

In the spring and early summer of 1915 many poet-soldiers expressed their sorrow at Brooke's loss directly to Edward Marsh, friend and patron to many of the emerging generation of artists and writers. Many had admired Brooke's poetry before the war, and continued to admire it after his death, seeing the War Sonnets as part of a whole body of work. The acceptance of Brooke as a fellow chronicler of the war experience working within an inherited poetic mode of expression persisted throughout the war period.

Many aspired to it. Robert Graves was one of these, writing to Marsh from France in May 1915 to say that he was ‘truly grieved … generally for all of us who know what poetry is’. He concluded consolingly, aware also of Marsh's personal loss as a friend, that ‘we can only be happy that he died cheerfully and in such a good cause’.