General Sir Ian Hamilton's dramatic comment, that after Brooke's death ‘The rest is silence’, proved incorrect, as the memorialising commenced immediately: it quickly took on a significant symbolic value. Reviews of the War Sonnets, and the incorporation of ‘The Soldier’ into the Easter sermon at St Paul's were one thing, but the death of the poet-soldier in April 1915 would come to represent something beyond individual tragedy. The genre that first raised Brooke and his poems in the public consciousness was the obituary.

The obituary was already a prominent, recognised literary genre in 1915. In outlining major life achievements, it also reaffirmed consensus social values. It developed out of the tradition of private death notices designed to announce the commencement of mourning. Numbers rose substantially in parallel with expanded literacy rates and the rise of newspapers. In wartime Britain, social historians have pointed out that the encounter with the death of large numbers of young men was at odds with progress in mortality rates made in the late Victorian and Georgian periods. Death – from injury, accident, and illness – once a private and fairly regular element of family life, was again, shockingly, claiming large numbers of young men and women. The genre both informed and depended on a larger cultural shift relating to death as a social experience, as rituals surrounding the death of royalty and politicians evolved from private affairs to public pageants. Death was (for lack of a better word) accessible to all, and communal participation, either organised or spontaneous, substantiated awareness of the national community. The obituary functioned not necessarily in order to emphasise ideals important to the deceased or to his or her family, but instead to present a valuation of the individual's cultural contribution. This was particularly important during wartime, and was in great demand given the sudden preponderance of death.

This meant that from 1914 to 1918 the war forced the government and the public to develop ways of coping with death in practical and symbolic ways. Charles Masterman later observed that while at Wellington House he had ‘only been able to write occasional articles … for the most part obituaries for friends’.