The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke #244657

The poet loves his new-found element. He clings to mortality; to life, not thought; or, as he puts it, to the concrete, — let the abstract go pack! There's little comfort in the Wise, he ends. But in the unfolding of his precocious spirit, the literary control comes upper most; his boat, finding its keel, swings to the helm of mind. How should it be otherwise for a youth well-born, well-bred, in college air? Intellectual primacy showed itself to him in many wandering loves, fine lover that he Ewas; but in the end he was an intellectual lover, and the magnet seems to have been especially powerful in the ghosts of the men of wit, Donne, Marvell erudite lords of language, poets in another world than ours, a less ample ether, a less divine air, our fathers thought, but poets of eternity A quintessential drop of intel lect is apt to be in poetic blood. How Platonism fasci nates the poets, like a shining bait! Rupert Brooke will have none of it; but at a turn of the verse he is back at it.