Poetry Out of My Head and Heart

by Isaac Rosenberg

An astonishing discovery was made in 1995 during the British Library's removal from the British Museum. Thirty-four letters and eighteen draft poems, including ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, ‘Dead Man's Dump’ and ‘Returning, We Hear the Larks’ by the major First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg, were found in a bundle of papers stored by former museum keeper Laurence Binyon, himself a poet and Rosenberg's mentor. The newly discovered papers include all Rosenberg's complete letters and draft poems to Binyon and the poet Gordon Bottomley, together with material about Rosenberg from family, friends and mentors such as his sister Annie, Whitechapel librarian Morley Dainow, schoolteacher Winifreda Seaton, and patron Frank Emanuel. All are published here, most for the first time.

152 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2007

About the 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.