When it comes to First World War poets, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke are familiar names, but not Isaac Rosenberg, who is certainly their equal. The English-born son of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, Rosenberg enlisted in the British Army in 1916 and was killed in close combat in the early hours of April 1, 1918, near the French village of Fampoux. He was 27.
Rosenberg was doubly gifted. He began his creative career as a visual artist, his drawings and paintings passing the stringent admissions test at London’s world-famous Slade School of Art where one of his classmates was the future luminary Stanley Spencer. Poetry proved to be his primary passion, leading to some initial success—two of his “trench poems” appeared in the December 1916 issue of Harriet Monroe’s prestigious Poetry magazine. But while he has not been without admirers, Rosenberg’s working-class Jewishness resulted in a late and grudging acceptance into the canon of English poetry.
