SOURCE: "Onomastic Devices in the Poetry of Rupert Brooke," in Literary Onomastics Studies, Vol. IX, 1982, pp. 183-208.

In the following essay, Read explores the diversity and use of place names in Brooke's poetry.

My interest in the subject of Rupert Brooke's use of place names has arisen from the great diversity of opinion concerning his famous sonnet entitled, "The Soldier." When I was coming into young manhood, in the early 1920s, in the aftermath of World War I (or "The Great War," as its usual name then was), Rupert Brooke's reputation was extremely high. Most people thrilled to his lines:

But in the next decade, the 1930s, when the pacifist outlook became ascendant, Brooke's reputation began to fade, and some of my friends poured scorn on his famous lines. It is a false sentimentality, they pointed out, to say that "some corner of a foreign field" should be...