Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet

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.