Volume 30, Number 12 · July 21, 1983
The Face Behind the Lines
By Robert Bernard Martin
The Image of the Poet: British Poets and their Portraits
by David Piper
Oxford University Press, 219 pp., $25.00
Once everyone knew what a real poet ought to look like. Half a century ago the beautiful, doomed profile of Rupert Brooke seemed to define all that was heartbreaking in a generation of lyricism extinguished by what Sir David Piper calls 'a fate that knew what it was up to.' When Henry James heard of the death of Brooke at twenty-eight, he murmured, 'Of course, of course.' Ironically for the question of the relation between looks and books, a far better poet of the period, Wilfred Owen, survives in depressingly conventional photographs of a young soldier who looks incapable of reading his own poetry, let alone composing it.
Review, 2543 words
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