Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” Revisited: A New Perspective

Abstract

Though Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” has often been interpreted, categorized or dismissed as a poem on idealized patriotism, its underlying nationalistic and colonialist/imperialist dimensions have not been duly treated alongside its patriotic dimension. Since the 1980s, there has been a resurgence of interest in such interrelated themes as patriotism, nationalism, and postcolonialism due to the engagement of some political, philosophical, and literary theorists with a wide range of conceptual and moral debates. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine Brooke’s poem in greater detail and, consequently, to update the previous research on this poem in the light of these debates. The main thesis of the paper is that Brook’s “The Soldier” is a multifaceted poem which has a variety of different features which can be interpreted on various levels, namely patriotism, nationalism, and colonialism/imperialism..