SOURCE: "Brooke's Poetry," in Rupert Brooke, Twayne Publishers, 1994, pp. 31-63.

In the following essay, Laskowski provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Brooke's verse.

Readers of Geoffrey Keynes's edition of The Poetical Works of Brooke, initially published in 1946, will be immediately struck by Keynes's unusual arrangement of the poems in reverse chronological order, with the exception of some fragments Brooke wrote en route to the Dardanelles in 1915. In his edition Keynes has added 38 previously unpublished poems to the 82 originally included in Poems (1911) and 1914 and Other Poems, some of them of little intrinsic merit or interest, perhaps with less justification than Anthony Thwaite's controversial additions to the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin. The effect of such an arrangement gives the appearance of protecting, or at least admitting the lesser value of, Brooke's earliest works. It tacitly—almost implicitly—gives credence to the theory that Brooke's main poetic appeal lies...