Poet Rupert Brooke remembered 100 years after First World War

Rupert Brooke wrote his poems in the early months of the First World War. He saw the conflict as an adventure, and thought that signing up to fight was a noble self sacrifice, as well as a chance to escape everyday life.

He grew in Rugby, and attended the town's prestigious public school, where his father taught.

Members of Rugby's poetry group appreciate he doesn't give a full picture of the war, but say it's important to have a record of that early positivity which he shared with much of society.

Rugby School lost nearly 700 of the brightest young men in the country. Brooke was one of the best - a prize winner and founder of a school magazine.

Nine months into the conflict Brooke's poem The Soldier was read to the congregation at St Paul's Cathedral, and subsequently published in The Times.

His youthful hope was being turned into propaganda. But looking back, Andrew Fletcher just gets a sense of waste.

We'll never know what kind of poems Brooke would have written if he'd lived. But he's left us with a sense of the hope war once brought.