One Man's Verse in No Man's Land

"Isaac Rosenberg"
By Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Northwestern University Press, 468 pages, $35


Rosenberg was introduced to the glories of English poetry, Ms. Wilson says, less by his schoolteachers than by his intellectual older sister and the free libraries of London, where his family had moved in 1897.

One great benefit of Ms. Wilson's portrait is that it allows us to encounter the Whitechapel Group, a coterie of writers, including Rosenberg, who are now overshadowed by the contemporaneous Bloomsbury set. Of course Bloomsbury's inhabitants (Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey et al.) prided themselves on their bohemian ways, but most were children of privilege. By contrast, Ms. Wilson writes, "the Whitechapel Group, all Jewish, came from far poorer backgrounds." Among their number was Stephen Winsten, who wrote a biography of George Bernard Shaw, and Joseph Leftwich, a Yiddish translator, and John Rodker, a modernist writer.


From Rosenberg's "Dead Man's Dump":

A man's brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer's face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.

From "Break Day in the Trenches":

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

HWPL owns:

Rosenberg, Isaac. (1979). The collected works of Isaac Rosenberg: poetry, prose, letters, paintings, and drawings. New York: Oxford University Press.
.