Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet: A New Life

by Jean Moorcroft Wilson

Isaac Rosenberg was among the greatest poets of the First World War. The British-born son of impoversihed Russian Jews, Rosenberg fought as a private in the trenches of the Great Was and died on the Western Front in 1918 as the age of 27. In Isaac Rosenberg, Wilson examines the influence of Rosenberg's class and heritage on his writings, as well as the development of his poetic technique. She traces his maturation from his childhood in Bristol and the Jewish East End of London to art school, his travels to South Africa, and finally his harrowing service as a private in the British Army.

 

Rosenberg was also a gifted painter and this beautifully illustrated volume oncludes some hitherto inseen self-portraits, along with photogrpahs of Rosenberg and his family. Wilson's biogrpahy brings together all known Rosenberg material with a mass of important new discoveries. Isaac Rosenberg is a long-overdue consideration of a remarkable war poet.

Genres: Biography Memoir

504 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.