He was the first and only son of Helene Fels, a member of the prominent Hallenstein family of clothing merchants through her mother, and her husband Hyam Brasch, a lawyer who later changed his name to Henry Brash.

[1][3]: 11  He grew up in Dunedin and spent much time at Manono, the house of his mother's father, Willi Fels, who instilled in him a lifelong love of European culture and artworks, and later supported his career in the arts.

[1][2] He was unofficially tutored by his mother's cousin Esmond de Beer, who had lived in London since childhood, and who along with his sisters introduced Brasch to a love of fine art that would last the rest of his life.

[2][5] After finding that working in the family firm did not suit him,[6]: 304  and after what was described by James Bertram as a "bitter showdown" with his father,[7] he returned to England in 1932.

[4] In the late 1930s he spent time in Italy, France, Germany, Greece, Palestine and Russia, and travelled by rail with Ian Milner east across America.

[8] The title poem was the strongest in the collection, and considered the identity of the European coloniser in New Zealand, where "the newcomer heart ... moves gauchely still, half alien".

[6]: 281–283, 589  He later described Bletchley Park as Kafkaesque, with no one willing to make decisions; he and his colleagues could not get an old unsafe stove replaced until it had set the room on fire.

Brasch wrote in his journal that although he did not like all the poems that Curnow had chosen, the fact of his inclusion gave him "a great sense of support, of being established, having arrived".

[4][6]: 281  In an interview with Milner in 1971, he said he knew he had to return as the war went on; "I did not fully understand what [New Zealand] meant to me until I feared to lose it for ever when France fell and the bombing of London started.

[4] His vision for the journal was that it would be "distinctly of New Zealand without being parochial",[3]: 388  and he viewed the likely audience as the educated public: "Everyone for whom literature and the arts are a necessity of life.

Stead, Ruth Dallas, Allen Curnow, James K. Baxter and Fleur Adcock, and there were reproductions of paintings, sculptures and photographs by various New Zealand artists including Colin McCahon, Evelyn Page and others.

[19][4] In May 1963 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Otago to recognise his contributions to New Zealand culture as an editor, arts patron and poet.

[24][25][26] In 2013, this collection was included as an entry on the UNESCO Memory of the World Aotearoa New Zealand Ngā Mahara o te Ao register.

[28] Unlike his earlier work, his final poems dealt more with personal concerns and feelings than with broader issues of national identity.

[4] In July 1976, O. E. Middleton and John Caselberg organised a three-day Charles Brasch Arts Festival in Dunedin as a tribute to him.

[29] When gifting his journals and personal papers to the Hocken Library, Brasch did so on the condition that they be embargoed for thirty years after his death, to avoid embarrassing his friends.

[32] She also began work on transcribing the journals before her own death in 2014,[33] and said that she found it painful to read of Brasch's unhappiness and his inability to accept his sexuality.

[33][34] In 2015, the Otago University Press published a collection of Brasch's Selected Poems, chosen and edited by his friend and literary executor Alan Roddick.

[35] Lawrence Jones in the Otago Daily Times wrote that the collection "offers the reader in an expertly and sympathetically edited, beautifully designed and printed book of 150 pages the opportunity to experience Brasch's poetic journey": "Such poems, although written in currently unfashionable modes, when they are read in their own terms remain alive and relevant as the testament to the poetic development of a reserved man of great integrity and insight, one of the makers of a New Zealand high culture".

[38] In the 1940s while returning home from England to New Zealand, Brasch unsuccessfully proposed to Rose Archdall, a widow whom he met on the SS Themistocles.