In mute testimony, perhaps, to the passing of his famous hour, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973) is utterly silent about Rupert Brooke’s well-known lines and lineaments. In A History of Modern Poetry, however, the first volume of which appeared in 1976, David Perkins speaks loud and clear: “[Brooke’s] legend is now dead and, without it, neither the man nor the poetry is likely to sustain interest.” Yet just a few years later, the Bloomsbury memoirist John Lehmann argued that, with the new materials (letters and reminiscences) available since Christopher Hassall’s “monumental” biography (1964) and Geoffrey Keynes’s edition of the letters (1968), a more realistic portrait of the man and estimate of the poet had been made possible. In effect, Lehmann tried to modernize Rupert Brooke, matching his personal qualities with the strengths and weaknesses of his poems and sorting out the ironies and ambiguities as well as the achievements of an unfinished life. Now, in a book marking the centenary of Brooke’s birth,[1] Paul Delany (of D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare fame) rejects Lehmann’s Brooke as adding up to no more than “a repressed homosexual” and assures us that since the poet’s premature death in 1915 his “reputation has gone through the whole cycle from adulation to contemptuous dismissal without any trustworthy account of the kind of person he really was.”

Furthermore, Delany claims that Brooke’s significance today lies in the cultural moment his life can elucidate and that “restoring] him to the true company