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    Isaac Rosenberg, A Great Neglected Poet A

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    Omar Quilligana
    Isaac Rosenberg was a British poet who served and died in World War I. While his contemporary Wilfred Owen is better known today, Rosenberg was equally talented in both poetry and painting. Rosenberg was born in 1890 to poor Jewish immigrants in England. He showed an early talent for art and was accepted to the prestigious Slade School of Art in London. However, with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rosenberg enlisted despite having a lung condition. He served as a common soldier in France until he was killed in 1918. Rosenberg's poetry focused on specifically describing his own wartime experiences, unlike Owen who aimed to generalize and universalize experiences into metaphors. Rosenberg's poetry provides insightful glimpses into

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    Isaac Rosenberg, A Great Neglected Poet A

    Uploaded by

    Omar Quilligana
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    Isaac Rosenberg was a British poet who served and died in World War I. While his contemporary Wilfred Owen is better known today, Rosenberg was equally talented in both poetry and painting. Rosenberg was born in 1890 to poor Jewish immigrants in England. He showed an early talent for art and was accepted to the prestigious Slade School of Art in London. However, with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rosenberg enlisted despite having a lung condition. He served as a common soldier in France until he was killed in 1918. Rosenberg's poetry focused on specifically describing his own wartime experiences, unlike Owen who aimed to generalize and universalize experiences into metaphors. Rosenberg's poetry provides insightful glimpses into

    Original Title

    READING LESSON IV 1

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    Isaac Rosenberg was a British poet who served and died in World War I. While his contemporary Wilfred Owen is better known today, Rosenberg was equally talented in both poetry and painting. Rosenberg was born in 1890 to poor Jewish immigrants in England. He showed an early talent for art and was accepted to the prestigious Slade School of Art in London. However, with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rosenberg enlisted despite having a lung condition. He served as a common soldier in France until he was killed in 1918. Rosenberg's poetry focused on specifically describing his own wartime experiences, unlike Owen who aimed to generalize and universalize experiences into metaphors. Rosenberg's poetry provides insightful glimpses into

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    42 views1 page

    Isaac Rosenberg, A Great Neglected Poet A

    Uploaded by

    Omar Quilligana
    Isaac Rosenberg was a British poet who served and died in World War I. While his contemporary Wilfred Owen is better known today, Rosenberg was equally talented in both poetry and painting. Rosenberg was born in 1890 to poor Jewish immigrants in England. He showed an early talent for art and was accepted to the prestigious Slade School of Art in London. However, with the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rosenberg enlisted despite having a lung condition. He served as a common soldier in France until he was killed in 1918. Rosenberg's poetry focused on specifically describing his own wartime experiences, unlike Owen who aimed to generalize and universalize experiences into metaphors. Rosenberg's poetry provides insightful glimpses into

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    Isaac Rosenberg, a great neglected poet

    A
    Among the many British First World War poets, Wilfred Owen is perhaps the most well-known.
    His verses are taught in British schools, and most Britons can recite a few lines from his most
    famous poem Anthem for Doomed Youth. But there is another war poet from the same period
    who is less well known and his name is Isaac Rosenberg. The reasons for his relative obscurity
    are not clear. His poetry is as equally excellent and powerful as any Owen wrote, and the story of
    his short life is in many ways similar to Owen’s. In addition to his poetry, he was also a talented
    painter.

    B
    Rosenberg was born in Bristol in the South of England on November 25, 1890. His parents were
    poor Jewish immigrants from Latvia and Isaac was their first son. Shortly after he was born, his
    family moved from Bristol to Stepney, a very poor area in the East End of London, where Isaac
    attended school. At an early age he showed great talent for painting and drawing, and soon he
    was able to enroll in the Slade School of Art, a well-known art school in London. He was a hard-
    working and popular student, publishing a pamphlet of 10 poems in 1912, and holding an
    exhibition of paintings at a well-known gallery in London. A promising career awaited him.
    However, in 1914, he became ill with a lung condition and moved to South Africa to live with his
    sister Mina, who had moved there.

    C
    When the war broke out, Rosenberg, unlike most of his contemporaries, was not cheerful and
    optimistic about it. “Nothing can justify war,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. Although he could
    have avoided doing so because he was a very short man, he enlisted as a common soldier, not
    as an officer, and served in France. He was very disturbed by the violence and noise of the
    shells, but continued to write and draw. He was killed, probably by a sniper, on the night of April
    1, 1918.

    D
    One of the things admirers of Rosenberg’s poetry note about it is its specificity. While Owen did
    his best to generalize his experiences in the trenches, to universalize it, Rosenberg on the other
    hand wrote about his specific experiences without trying to turn them into general metaphors for
    the human condition in times of war. Two short examples will show the difference clearly. Owen’s
    famous line from Strange Meeting: “I am the enemy you killed, my friend,” originally went like
    this: “I was a German conscript, and your friend.” You can see from this how Owen took a
    specific experience he had had, of killing a German conscript, and made him into a universal but
    vague figure: the enemy. Rosenberg, on the contrary, always chose to focus on describing as
    precisely as possible his own specific experience. In his poem Break of Day in the Trenches, the
    speaker of the poem picks a poppy and puts it behind his ear. The last line of the poem notes
    how the poppy is undamaged in spite of the bombardment, but: “Just a little white with the dust.”

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