[log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> This article from NYTimes.com
> [clip]
> November 27, 2002
> By ALAN RIDING
> [clip]
> > To this day, every time Britons go to war, the opening
> lines of Rupert Brooke's 1914 poem, "The Soldier," are
> remembered: "If I should die, think only this of me:/That
> there's some corner of a foreign field/That is forever
> England." [clip]

The crucial fact re this poem is its _date_, 1914. It is essentially a
_pre-war_ poem, not a war poem. It belongs in the same category as a
poem WW 1 buried: The poem that contains the lines "Play up, play up,
and play the game" and "drenched with the blood of a broken square."
(Can't remember title or author.) It is part of the _significance_, if
not the meaning, of TWL that it 'celebrates' a world in which such poems
can no longer be written.

Carrol