Although the balance was grossly skewed in favour of praise, even during the war reactions to the popular, abstracted ideal of Brooke as ‘England's Poet-Soldier’ and ‘the laureate of the war he never really saw’ were not universally positive. It was almost impossible, at least in public, to criticise him personally. He had fallen out with a number of individuals in the years and months preceding the war, particularly in Bloomsbury circles. But when he died, most who had known him personally, or in a professional, literary capacity, were genuinely sorry: everyone, whatever stance they took on the war, read his death as tragic.

Still, as Brooke's very public death gave way to an even greater public fashioning of his posthumous reputation, some took it upon themselves to voice their scepticism. Reacting as much to the process through which his memory was sanctified as to the sheer number of people who felt empowered to join in the defining and distilling of his life's worth, Cambridge friends first began to push back against the myth as early as May 1915. Over the course of the war, a broader coalition of critics called into question his authorial reputation, even as they were careful to acknowledge his personal sacrifice.

Ironically, even as he introduced Brooke to a wider reading public, Dean Inge was one of the first to offer up a tentative criticism of elements of ‘The Soldier’ in 1915. His religious reading of the poem stressed that it did not go far enough in achieving a self-surrender, wherein the individual completely relinquished his body to reward the soul. There could be no holding back, no overt attachment to material and physical delights, because this was both the ideal inspired by Christ and the behaviour required in wartime.

Charles Sorley had similar reservations about the poet-soldier's philosophical and stylistic approach to the War Sonnets. He appreciated Brooke's technical abilities as a poet, but took issue with the ‘sentimental attitude’ of the poems and what he viewed as their insularity and self-satisfaction: ‘They’, the soldiers of ‘The Dead’, had not given up ‘anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but … the essence of these things had been endangered by circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to recapture them’.