Soldiers – and within this group would-be poet-soldiers – formed another of the reading ‘constituencies’, and one keenly invested in the developing Brooke myth. The more extreme, jingoistic expressions of wartime patriotism were not always welcomed by soldiers on active duty, as ‘celebration and civilian commemoration unwittingly highlighted and to some extent deepened the divide between soldiers and non-combatants’. During the war few viewed Brooke's War Sonnets and the responses his death inspired in the press as falling into this category. Soldiers and civilians alike accepted and in some cases adopted the language expressed by ‘England's Poet-Soldier’ and reiterated by his many established and emerging champions, which worked to elevate the sacrifices of the war dead above the dayto- day degradations of a dirty, extended campaign: ‘There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, / But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold’. The Brooke myth mediated between soldiers and civilians – and poet-soldiers and their potential readerships – locating ideals common to all: ‘There was never a moment of the war … when, to the majority of Englishman, including those in the trenches, his rhetoric did not seem the most appropriate way of speaking and writing about the ideals of war’.

In the spring and early summer of 1915 many poet-soldiers expressed their sorrow at Brooke's loss directly to Edward Marsh, friend and patron to many of the emerging generation of artists and writers. Many had admired Brooke's poetry before the war, and continued to admire it after his death, seeing the War Sonnets as part of a whole body of work. The acceptance of Brooke as a fellow chronicler of the war experience working within an inherited poetic mode of expression persisted throughout the war period.

Many aspired to it. Robert Graves was one of these, writing to Marsh from France in May 1915 to say that he was ‘truly grieved … generally for all of us who know what poetry is’. He concluded consolingly, aware also of Marsh's personal loss as a friend, that ‘we can only be happy that he died cheerfully and in such a good cause’.