ABSTRACT
A licencing of sentimentality is subtly read by Andrew Hodgson, a clear indicator of Rupert Brooke’s opposition to the kind of poetic ‘intelligence’avowed by T. S. Eliot. If Brooke’s poetry is marked by an ‘intelligence’, it is one of tones which, as Hodgson’s attentive reading shows, resides in moments of self-irony and undercutting humour that deflates gestures towards rhetorical aloofness. Ultimately, Brooke is a poet who looks squarely at the tragic limitations of the human condition, but refuses to endow personal feelings with any sense of enduring sentimentality.
