The Short Life of Rupert Brooke

by Maggie B. Dickinson
On the Greek Island of Skyros, its shores lapped with Byron's "wine-dark sea", is a lonely grave.  Buried here is Rupert Chawner Brooke - writer, poet and playwright. Strikingly good-looking, he was described by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats as "the most handsome young man in England."
Despite only a single book of his poems being published during his lifetime in 1911, he posthumously achieved a cult status that refuses to go away after almost a century.  It is evidence enough of how much the talented Brooke ploughed into the quality of his work in the twenty seven years of ...