Excerpt from Poems OF the many young poets who gave their lives in the war, Isaac Rosenberg was not the least gifted. Adverse circumstances, imperfect education, want of opportunity, impeded and obscured his genius; but whatever criticism be made of his poetry, its faults are plainly those of excess rather than deficiency. His writing was often difficult and Obscure, because he instinctively thought in images and did not sufficiently appreciate the limitations of language. Also, a continual fear of being empty or thin led him to an over-intricate complexity. But there was no incoherence in his mind. And the main object of these notes, beyond recording the facts of his life, is to illustrate the growth and workings of his mind from his own letters, which will be the best commentary on his poems.
Author
Isaac Rosenberg is widely recognised as one of the finest English poets of the First World War. Born into a working class Jewish family, at the age of seven Rosenberg moved from Bristol to a strongly Jewish area of East London. At fourteen he left school to become an apprentice engraver, but at the outbreak of the Great War he was living in South Africa with his sister in the hope that a warm climate would do his chronic bronchitis some good. Critical of the war from the outset, he nevertheless joined up in 1915. He was killed near the Somme on the Western Front in 1918. He is currently commemorated as one of 16 Great War Poets in Westminster Abbey.
