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Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet

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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.