Isaac Rosenberg
As we approach a new century, few of us today have any links with World War I. The old soldiers at the Cen-otaph get fewer every year, and we are left with images of trench-bound madness and sadness at the millions of young lives wasted.
But there is a legacy peculiar to the First World War – that of a group of young men who combined vivid, first-hand accounts of the horror with a rare poetic skill. Today, the work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke is widely read. But there was one who could have been the greatest of all.
The irony was that the war, having pulled the best work out of Isaac Rosenberg, would snuff out his life before he had the chance to enjoy the certain fame that awaited him.
Unlike the rest of the war poets, Rosenberg died a private. The others were officers, children of comfortable, middle-class English homes. Isaac’s story was very different.
Rosenberg’s family had fled Lithuania at the end of the 19th century, settling first in Bristol, where Isaac was born in 1890, then quickly moving on to the East End of London, lodging at 47 Cable Street.
He was a pupil at St Paul’s School, in Wellclose Square, Whitechapel, moving to Baker Street School in 1900, when
the family moved to Stepney’s Jubilee Street.
Rosenberg was already showing a precocious talent
for drawing and painting – Mr Usherwood, the headmaster at Baker Street, fixed up extra art classes for the lad at Stepney Green Art School. He was also showing skills at verse, composing poetry from the age of 14. His guiding light was Morely Dainow, the librarian at Whitechapel Library, who would recommend books to Isaac, encouraging him and firing his imagination.
But unlike Owen and company, there was no public school and university in which to hone his skills – money had to be made. At 14, Isaac left school to take up an engraving apprenticeship at Carl Hent-schel’s firm in Fleet Street
It may have been a job, but the skills learned at Hentchel’s and further developed at evening classes at Birkbeck College refined his drawing skills. In his time at Birkbeck he won prizes for his nude studies in pencil and then in oils.
Rosenberg’s life was running on parallel lines to that of
fellow artist Mark Gertler – another artistic genius who blossomed from a poor, Jewish, East End family. And in 1911, just like Gertler, Rosenberg finally managed to study art full time, with a scholarship at the coveted Slade School.
Also like Gertler, he suffered ill health throughout his life. In Rosenberg’s case, lung problems brought on by the London smog led him to a rest cure first at Bournemouth, then in the healthy dry heat of South Africa.
In 1914, Rosenberg was recovering at his sister’s home in Cape Town when he heard the news that war had broken out in Europe.
Isaac was slowly finding
success. A commission in July that year from Sir Herbert Stanley paid him £15 for one painting – £15 being the price of a ticket from Cape Town. He could have sat the war out and concentrated on his work, but he immediately set sail for London.
Gertler’s most famous painting, ‘The Merry go Round’ was an outsider’s view of the meaningless madness of the Great War. Rosenberg would view it at first hand.
Most of the young artist’s paintings were lost overboard in a storm in Cape Town harbour. And his luck seemed no better in London, where he applied unsuccessfully for a series of rent-paying jobs.
The irony was that, while struggling to make ends meet, he was now finding renown as a poet as well as a painter.
He signed up in the army in 1915, but before going to the front he published a small volume of poems, ‘Youth’. Both
T S Eliot and Ezra Pound admired Rosenberg’s poetry. Some critics suggest that, had he survived the war, he might have rivalled those two poetic giants in reputation.
He produced some of his greatest work in the long
hours in the trenches. ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ and ‘Marching’ compare with the best of Owen and Sassoon.
But on April 1, 1918, Private Rosenberg, 22311, 1st King’s Own Royal Lancasters, was killed on dawn patrol, leaving the art and poetry critics to wonder what might have been.