SOURCE: "Sir Walter Ralegh as Poet and Philosopher," in Essays on Shakespeare and Other Elizabethans, Yale University Press, 1948, pp. 121-44.

In the following excerpt, which is drawn from a lecture originally delivered in 1938, Brooke discusses Raleigh's poetry and prose, as well as his personality and career, as products of Elizabethan romanticism.

When Sir Walter Ralegh was beheaded, October 29, 1618, there died the last of the Elizabethan romanticists. He outlived his age, and came in the end to suffer by the defects of the very virtues which had made him great.

He has a vast deal in common with each of his romantic colleagues, Sidney, Spenser, and Marlowe. He shares Sidney's courtly brilliance and chivalry, Spenser's political imagination, and Marlowe's luminous independence of mind. He is more like each of the three than any of them was like another. He had been acquainted with them all: with Sidney at the...