Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet

by Jean Moorcroft Wilson

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 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.

Genres: Biography Memoir

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Jean Moorcroft Wilson is a lecturer in English at Birkbeck, University of London.

Reviews

[Natania · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Wilson's prose is workmanlike at best, it has energy and carries the reader along on the back of a story told with empathy and verve. Rosenberg was a tremendously poignant, tragic figure, and there is so much here to fascinate students of war, of Jewish culture in England, of London's East End and its history, of poetry and art. The book haunted me, during and after the reading; I won't soon forget the figure of this small, awkward, determined man who, having been weaned on Yiddish, with no English speaking ability until the age of 7, became, in my and others' opinion, the greatest of the WWI poets.

[Eleni · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not read the entire book for lack of time for my research, but I read from Chapter 10 onwards from the time Rosenberg met Edward Marsh.