Isaac Rosenberg Biography | Poet

Isaac Rosenberg (November 25, 1890 - April 1, 1918) was an English poet of the First World War who was considered to be one of the greatest of all British war poets. His "Poems from the Trenches" are recognised as some of the most outstanding written during the First World War.

Some sources spell his name Rosenburg.

Biography

Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol and moved to 47 Cable Street in 1897, a poor district of the East End of London, and one with a strong Jewish community. He attended St. Paul's School around the corner in Wellclose Square, until his family (of Russian descent) moved to Stepney in 1900, so he could experience Jewish schooling. He left school when was fourteen, where he became an apprentice engraver.

Suffering from chronic bronchitis, which he was afraid would only worsen, Rosenberg, to try and cure himself, emigrated to the warmer climate of South Africa, where his sister Mina lived.

He was interested in both poetry and visual art, and managed to find the finances to attend the Slade School. At his time at Slade School, Rosenberg notably studied alongside David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth and Dora Carrington. He was taken up by Laurence Binyon and Edward Marsh, and began to write poetry seriously, but he suffered from ill-health.

He wrote the poem On Receiving News of the War in Cape Town, South Africa. While others wrote about war as patriotic sacrifice, Rosenberg was critical of the war from its onset. Still, in order to find a "job," and be able to help support his mother, Rosenberg, having returned to England, enlisted in October, 1915, and was assigned to the 12th Suffolk Folk Regiment, a 'bantam' battalion (men under 5'3"). After turning down an offer to become a lance corporal, Private Rosenberg was later transferred to the 11th Battalion, The King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment (KORL). He was sent to (the Somme, on the Western Front in France where, having just finished night patrol, he was killed, at dawn, on April 1, 1918; there is a dispute as to whether his death occurred at the hands of a sniper, or in close combat. In either case, Fampoux is the name of the town where he died. He was first buried in a mass grave, but in 1926, his remains, having been identified, were reinterred, not in England, but at Bailleul Road East Cemetery, Plot V, St. Laurent-Blangy, Pas de Calais, France.

Rosenberg's works are often drawn upon by historians as, unlike more famous war-poets, he was not only Jewish but a private.

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell's landmark study of the literature of the First World War, Fussell identifies Rosenberg's Break of Day in the Trenches as "the greatest poem of the war."