Rupert Chawner Brooke was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially "The Soldier". He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man in England". He died of septicaemia following a mosquito bite whilst aboard a French hospital ship moored off the island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea.

Skyros, in some historical contexts Latinized Scyros, is an island in Greece. It is the southernmost island of the Sporades, an archipelago in the Aegean Sea. Around the 2nd millennium BC, the island was known as The Island of the Magnetes; later, it was consecutively known as Pelasgia, Dolopia, and finally Skyros. At 209 km2 (81 sq mi), it is the largest island of the Sporades, and had a population of about 3,000 in 2021.