ABSTRACT
The outbreak of the Great War led to the break-up of the group, with the Frosts returning to the USA, Rupert Brooke, and eventually Thomas and Gibson, enlisting in the armed forces. In Rupert Brooke's poetry specifically we may discern a wrestling with definitions of Englishness characteristic of Dymock, but combined with an engagement with aesthetic modernism that was peculiar to his own artistic purpose. The debt which modernity owed to imperialism is spectacularly located in Paul Gauguin's Tahitian paintings and writings, a locus of work which Brooke's South Seas poetry curiously doubles and refracts. Brooke echoed his predecessors in diagnosing the decay and dissolution concomitant with modernity as key elements in the disappearance of the primitive, earlier in his travels listing 'Civilisation, disease, alcohol, and vice' as the forces arrayed against native American Indians.
