Brooke made friends among the Bloomsbury group of writers, some of whom admired his talent while others were more impressed by his good looks. He also belonged to another literary group known as the Georgian Poets and was one of the most important of the Dymock poets, associated with the Gloucestershire village of Dymock where he spent some time before the war. This group included both Robert Frost and Edward Thomas. He also lived at the Old Vicarage, Grantchester, which stimulated one of his best-known poems, named after the house, written with homesickness while in Berlin in 1912. While travelling in Europe, he prepared a thesis, entitled "John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama", which earned him a fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, in March 1913.
Brooke had his first heterosexual relationship with Élisabeth van Rysselberghe, daughter of painter Théo van Rysselberghe.[13] They met in 1911 in Munich.[14] His affair with Élisabeth came closest to be consummated than any other he ever had so far.[15] It is possible that the two became lovers in a "complete sense" in May 1913 in Swanley.[16] It was in Munich, where he had met Élisabeth, that a year later he finally succeeded in having intercourse with Ka Cox (Katherine Laird Cox).[15]
Brooke suffered a severe emotional crisis in 1912, resulting in the breakdown of his long relationship with Ka Cox.[17] Brooke's paranoia that Lytton Strachey had schemed to destroy his relationship with Cox by encouraging her to see Henry Lamb precipitated his break with his Bloomsbury group friends and played a part in his nervous collapse and subsequent rehabilitation trips to Germany.[18]
Rupert Brooke as an officer in 1914As part of his recuperation, Brooke toured the United States and Canada to write travel diaries for the Westminster Gazette. He took the long way home, sailing across the Pacific and staying some months in the South Seas. Much later it was revealed that he may have fathered a daughter with a Tahitian woman named Taatamata with whom he seems to have enjoyed his most complete emotional relationship.[19][20] Many more people were in love with him.[21] Brooke was romantically involved with the artist Phyllis Gardner and the actress Cathleen Nesbitt, and was once engaged to Noël Olivier, whom he met, when she was aged 15, at the progressive Bedales School.
Brooke's accomplished poetry gained many enthusiasts and followers, and he was taken up by Edward Marsh, who brought him to the attention of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. He enlisted at the outbreak of war in August 1914. He was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary sub-lieutenant[22] shortly after his 27th birthday, and was assigned to the Royal Naval Division, a branch of the Royal Navy but serving as an infantry unit. He took part in the Division’s Antwerp expedition in October 1914.[23]
Brooke came to public attention as a war poet early the following year, when The Times Literary Supplement published two sonnets ("IV: The Dead" and "V: The Soldier") on 11 March; the latter was then read from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday (4 April). His most famous collection of poetry, containing all five sonnets, 1914 & Other Poems, was first published in May 1915 and, in testament to his popularity, ran to 11 further impressions that year and by June 1918 had reached its 24th impression,[24] a process undoubtedly fuelled through posthumous interest.
