Favourite Poems: Dining-Room Tea, The Goddess in the Wood, Day and Night, Mutability, One Day,
The Treasure, The Dead (IV), The Soldier

Look, the bad stuff here is pretty dire, very clumsy and immature sentimentalist poetry of that strange sunlight period that was the Edwardian era. Still, it seems unfair to single out Brookes for being a foppish romantic writer of bad poetry, that's a time-honoured tradition that many men in their early 20s still keep alive today (Myself included!). Were it not for his circle of friends, dashing good looks, and poignant wartime Mediterrenean death a la Byron, it's likely that Brooke would have become something of a footnote to the lives of the far more interesting people who he found himself surrounded with.

Right?

As I said, most of the poetry here is for the birds, but I will say, I do think Brookes genuinely improved as a writer as the years progressed, with his best and most consistent collection of poems actually being his wartime works, often lambasted by many for being out of tune with the more appropriate despair of Owen and Sassoon. Brooke may very well have changed tack had he not died on enroute to Gallipolli, a campaign that was just as hellish as those faced by his contemporaries on the Western Front. Yet I don't find his war poems to be jingoistic or overtly nationalist. Naive sure, blisfully unaware of the actual horrors of conflict, absolutely. But also delicately matching the sincerity of his posthumous cult who find him a symbol of both lost innocence and the death of the Victorian/Edwardian era's notions of romantic idealism. 

Brooke may very well have turned out to be a legitimately great writer, and yet we shall never know for certain because he and so many other writers of that generation were cut down in the midst of their youth. The handful of good-to-great stuff that's littered here among the largely terribly is not enough for me to consider a full reassessment of Brook as a poet. But it is enough for me to understand his enduring appeal, mourning not the loss of what was there, but of what could have been. Plus he wrote a pretty funny poem about a Latin-speaking dog, so he clearly wasn't all bad.