Isaac Rosenberg

Abstract Rosenberg was killed in France in 1918. The poems he wrote during the war were his major achievement. The context and commentaries discuss the interaction in their subject matter, diction, and forms between his life experiences and his embedded sensitivity to the poetry of the Hebrew Bible and to scenes and motifs in classical texts, mainly Homer and Aeschylus, which he encountered in translations. The son of poor Jewish immigrants, his cultural heritage was supplemented by a limited school education and by his study of art (at the Slade) and English literature (at Birbeck College). The extant paramaterial he sent back from France includes drawings and letters that record physical and mental suffering and anti-Semitism. Rosenberg thought that poets should be ‘perverse’ and the subject matter and aesthetic of his work frequently subvert cultural and ethical expectations. The poems themselves are not poems of overt protest against the war. They focus on images and episodes that resonate with those in ancient texts but which are also transformed materially and imaginatively by the effects of war on the contemporary environment. Unease, premonitions of disaster, and relief at temporary survival are threaded through Rosenberg’s poems, which deploy techniques of affinity, ghosting, and improvisation rather than depending on intertextuality with the classical material. They create ‘thick’ classical receptions, a deep and sometimes subterranean engagement with war poetry focusing on images and reflections. The commentaries explain the stretched taxonomy this entails, discussing a variety of critical approaches, including associations with ecocriticism and catastrophe literature.