Rupert Brooke was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, the eldest of four children. His father, Commander John Sidney Brooke, Royal Navy, had just retired from the sea and was struggling to make a living at farming when he met Mona Binnie, a schoolteacher. She was very beautiful and had an uncanny knack of turning heads. They married in 1894 on the Isle of Wight.
Brooke had what his biographer calls "a lively sense of self-dramatisation"
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But he was also sensitive to his own need for affection and approval; after his parents' deaths he found it hard to cope with life alone. He had some happy experiences with women but his intense feelings were mostly expressed in poetry.
He was educated at Eton (1897-1902) and Oxford (1903-06), where he developed a lifelong passion for the classical texts of Homer and Sophocles.
He became known for exceptional skill in Latin verse, particularly the elegiac couplets of Ovid.
Brooke's first volume of verse appeared in 1899, when he was eighteen; it contained two poems called "The Last Post" and "The Unknown Quantity". The reviewers were not unkind but they did not take him seriously.
Undaunted by their cool reception, Brooke continued to write verse until 1913; during that time he produced more than three hundred poems of varying quality. His father paid him £20 per year for use of the family name on title-pages without any work done on them; but his mother provided little financial support, and she expected him to have a serious job as soon as possible to earn money to support her. Brooke continued to write poetry intermittently until 1922 when he gave it up as a job that didn't pay anything.
He spent most of his last decade as a private tutor in London where he befriended a number of poets whose work later became popular among the reading public: Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke's patron JH Hopkins, Paul Claudel and Louis MacNeice.
In 1910 Brooke met Roger Fry who became an early admirer as well as close friend until Fry's death in 1927. In 1909 Blake called upon him as one who would be able to write "an English Homer".
In September 1911 Brooke received a letter from Lady Ottoline Morrell inviting him to teach at her school at Hammersmith, which she had founded after resigning from her husband's charge as Chairman of the London County