Letters from America

In May 1913, Rupert Brooke embarked on a year-long expedition of North America, visiting the United States, Canada and finally the South Seas. He sent his impressions home in a series of letters, written for publication in the "Westminster Gazette", describing all his various experiences and reflections: the beauty of arriving, by boat, at night, in New York; the novelties of a baseball match; the awesome grandeur of the Niagara Falls and the Canadian wildernesses; and 'the full deliciousness of travelling in an American train by night through new scenery'. He is blunt in his judgements on society, business and cities, playful in his accounts of Anglo-American relations, and finally humbled by the vastness of the landscape in which he finds himself.