In this week's poem, Heaven, he shows a rather nice line in succinct, neo-Augustan satire. More than once he risked unglamorous and even grotesque poetic subjects (A Channel Passage describes seasickness, for example), and he might have made an excellent war poet, instead of a vacuously patriotic one, had he written not from the position of innocence but from experience. His prosodic instincts are conventional, but his imaginative world is richer than the anthology favourites suggest.
He was an above-average Edwardian poet who might have travelled farther towards modernism had he lived, though it's perhaps more likely that he would have turned to the novel. He had worked devotedly to perfect his writing since his schooldays, but the various strands of his talent were never brought together, and his self-dramatising tendencies remained like a lingering adolescence. Rupert Brooke was still an apprentice poet in 1915 when he died, aged 28, of blood poisoning, having never seen the military action he had romanticised in the five sonnets that culminate in The Soldier.
