Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet [Hardcover]

Jean Moorcroft Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2008

Siegfried Sassoon praised Isaac Rosenberg's “genius” and T.S. Eliot called him the “most extraordinary” of the Great War poets. This major reappraisal of his life and work by one of the leading authorities in World War I litereature is a fascinating biography. Rosenberg died on the Western Front in 1918 aged only 27, his tragic early death resembling that of many other well-known poets of that conflict. But he differed from the majority of Great War poets in almost every other respect: race, class, education, upbringing, experience, and technique. He was a skilled painter as well as a brilliant poet. The son of impoverished immigrant Russian Jews, he served as a private in the army and his perspective on the trenches is quite different from the other mainly officer-poets, allowing the voice of the "poor bloody Tommy" to be eloquently heard. Jean Moorcroft Wilson focuses on the relationship between Rosenberg's life and work, including his childhood in Bristol and the Jewish East End of London; his time at the Slade School of Art and friendship with David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, and Stanley Spencer; his visit to Cape Town, where he was staying when war broke out in August 1914 and where he fell in love with the divorced wife of South Africa's future Prime Minister; and his harrowing life as a private in the British Army.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Michael Rosen: "delightful to read... in a way I was reading about my grandparents... the other great thing about Jean's book is that she gets inside the poems and busts them apart in an utterly wonderful and ruthless way, it's quite an eyeopener... " -- Michael Rosen, NIGHTWAVES, BBC RADIO 3

"This author said of her biography of the wealthy Siegfried Sassoon, " A study of his life is a study of an age". So is this one." -- P J KAVANAGH, THE SPECTATOR

"This is a better book than Moorcroft Wilson's biography of Sassoon." -- LITERARY REVIEW

"What has been needed is a single, definitive biography bringing together the differing strands of fact and interpretation, while building on the new material and analysis of recent years. Jean Moorcroft Wilson has supplied it." -- VIVIEN NOAKES, FINANCIAL TIMES

"Wilson is excellent on Rosenberg's life and her comments on his poems are always grounded." -- FRANCES SPALDING, DAILY MAIL

"Wilson takes a fresh approach to the life of one of Britain's finest war poets looking not only at his military experiences but also his upbringing and love life." -- SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

"admiring and devotedly researched, yet critical of his character... Moorcroft Wilson's account, incorporating new findings is the fullest we are ever likely to get of his life... well worth buying for its splendid reproductions of his drawing and paintings." -- JOHN CAREY, SUNDAY TIMES

"meticulous..... this book is a tremendous achievement of research, ye the story it tells is so very remarkable." -- DAILY TELEGRAPH

"this is a measured, thoroughly researched biography, incorporating much new material by and about the poet, which should be definitive. With this labour of love, sensitively and sensibly analysing the poetry, Moorcroft Wilson has now surely said the last word on this gifted by tragically unlucky figure." -- SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

About the Author

Jean Moorcroft Wilson is an English professor.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Orion Publishing (March 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0297851454
• ISBN-13: 978-0297851455
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #606,116 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the best poets of WWI, July 18, 2001

By 

Guillermo Maynez (Mexico, Distrito Federal Mexico) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Isaac Rosenberg: Poet and Painter (Paperback)

In this rare book, the biographer gives us an accurate and objective portrait of one of those young men who were talented but whose life was sadly taken away by the ferocity of World War I. Rosenberg was the son of Jewish parents who migrated to England from Lithuania. He and his family were always very poor. Nonetheless, Isaac managed always to find supporters, both emotional and material, for his studies and work. This in spite of his being awkward, shy and a strange mixture of modesty and pride. Rosenberg was a poet but also a painter. His life was a constant struggle to achieve means to go on with his work in the midst of severe poverty. After spending some time with his sister's family in South Africa, he returned to England and made the decision to enlist as a private in the Army. He was sent to France, where he proved a terribly incompetent soldier: he was permanently absent-minded, lousy and irritated. Nevertheless, he managed to write some of the best poems of the war. The central fact that distinguishes his poems from those of other contemporaries who shared the experience of war, like Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon, is the dark sense of humor they display: "Break of day at the trenches" describes a rat passing over his body, while the soldier muses on the futility of war in a darkly humorous fashion. In fact, the original title was "The neutral rat". Compare this to lamentations like "Dulce et decorum est", by Thomas.

Rosenberg died on April 1st, 1918, after a ferocious counter-attack from the Germans, in the Battle of Arras. His body was never recovered, but his legacy if worth a look at.