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Isaac Rosenberg had written as well as published poetry before he entered the Great War in October 1915. He continued to write poems even after he joined the British Army, this time about his war experiences. Before he was killed in action on April 1, 1918, he had written a fair amount of war poetry from the trenches. The poems were mostly in manuscripts cherished by his sister Annie, who, with relentless zeal, was able finally to have them published in 1922. Unlike fellow war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, however, Rosenberg did not get immediate recognition. This was probably because, while his contemporaries wrote poetry of protest, satire, and pity, to which the general public could more readily respond, Rosenberg had a more nearly aesthetic ideal. Though he was born into a poor Jewish immigrant family in the East End of London, he was interested in art. Initially he dabbled in painting and attended art classes at Birkbeck College, London. Through the generosity of three Jewish ladies he attended the famous Slade School of Art in 1911, where he spent the next three years. Though he was able to hang his pictures in small galleries and sold a few, he realized that his professional success would not lie in that direction.
In any case he was more interested in reading and writing poetry. He was well read in English and French poetry. Starting with an enthusiasm for Yeats and Shelley and a passion for Shakespeare, he had his Donne period; and, among the Victorians, he liked Rossetti and Swinburne. His contemporary favorites were Francis Thompson, Abercrombie, and Bottomley; and he was aware of the symbolists like Poe and Verlaine. All in all he was much better read than nearly all of the war poets of his time. His early poems were published in fugitive magazines, and in 1912 he published a twenty-fourpage pamphlet, Night and Day, at his own expense. He met several literary figures (e.g. Marsh, Monro, Binyon, Bottomley), but they regarded him only as a poor Jew who wrote poems. Ezra Pound told Harriet Monroe, "he has something in him, horribly rough but then 'Stepney, East'-." Rosenberg grew friendly with editors and poets of the time, however, with whom...