Vivien Noakes on The Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg

This is the first scholarly edition of the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg. Although he is generally described as a First World War poet, this edition also highlights his pre-war achievement as a writer of powerful individual work.

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When Isaac Rosenberg was killed on 1 April 1918, one of the most distinctive and original voices of twentieth century English poetry was silenced. Rosenberg, who was born in Bristol in 1890, was the oldest son of a Lithuanian refugee, a Tolstoyan pacifist who had come to England to escape conscription into the Russian army. When he was seven, the family moved to Stepney, becoming part of the impoverished but intellectually exciting East End community of Jewish immigrants.

Unable to find a place in the oversubscribed Jews' Free School, Rosenberg went instead to the local board school. From his early years he straddled the two identities which characterise his poetry: at home his family spoke Yiddish, while at school he responded with excitement to the literary inheritance of his adopted country.

Although obsessed by the written word, Rosenberg's first ambition was to be a painter. After years apprenticed to an engraver, in 1912 he went as a student to the Slade. Here he was one of a remarkable group of students - Bomberg, Gertler, Roberts, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and Nevinson. But his health deteriorated, and in 1914 he travelled to South Africa to stay with his married sister. He was in South Africa when war was declared.

From the beginning Rosenberg wrote 'know that I despise war and hate war', and he expressed his thoughts in his poem, 'On Receiving News Of The War: Cape Town'.

Snow is a strange white word.
No ice or frost
Have asked of bud or bird
For Winter's cost.

Yet ice and frost and snow
From earth to sky
This Summer land doth know.
No man knows why.

In all men's hearts it is.
Some spirit old
Hath turned with malign kiss
Our lives to mould.

Red fangs have torn His face.
God¿s blood is shed.
He mourns from His lone place
His children dead.

O! ancient crimson curse!
Corrode, consume.
Give back this universe
Its pristine bloom.

He returned to England at the beginning of 1915, but had no plans to volunteer. Indeed, he believed that ' more men means more war' and that the artist's task should be to wait 'with beautiful drying towels of painted canvas, and precious ointments to smear and heal the soul'. But he was unable to find work, and heard that if he enlisted his mother would receive a separation allowance. The thought of killing appalled him, but after long deliberation he enlisted as a private in the Bantam battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. In July 1916 he was posted to France where he would remain, with one ten days' leave, until his death.

From the beginning he found army life difficult. His being a Jew set him apart from the other men, and his interest in painting and poetry meant that he was regarded as an oddity. His mind teemed with ideas, but there was little time for quiet thought. 'It is only when we get a bit of rest and the others might be gambling or squabbling I add a line or two', he told Edward Marsh in the summer of 1917. Then, he found it difficult to get paper. Many of his manuscripts, now mostly in the Imperial War Museum, are written on torn scraps, on the backs of envelopes, or on YMCA or Salvation Army paper which has been folded and torn and stained with trench mud so that some are almost illegible.

Unlike many of the war poets, Rosenberg's pre-war experience of the hardships of life meant that he suffered no disillusionment, for he had no illusions to shed. His finest war poems — 'Break of Day in the Trenches', 'Returning, we hear the larks', and 'Dead Man's Dump' — are powered, not by anger, but by the strong visual imagery of an artist. They speak, with both tenderness and strength, of soldiers trapped in the line where 'Poppies whose roots are in man's veins | Drop, and are ever dropping', of 'heights of night ringing with unseen larks | Music showering our upturned list'ning faces', and of the dying of young men:

None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.

A few days before he died he composed his last, wistful poem.

Through these pale cold days
What dark faces burn
Out of three thousand years,
And their wild eyes yearn,

While underneath their brows
Like waifs their spirits grope
For the pools of Hebron again —
For Lebanon's summer slope.

They leave these blond still days
In dust behind their tread
They see with living eyes
How long they have been dead.

He had written earlier, 'I am determined that this war, with all its powers for devastation, shall not master my poeting' I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.' There was to be no chance for refinement. Instead we are left with a handful of some of the most lyrical, individual poems ever to have come out of war.

Dr Vivien Noakes is the editor of a new definitive edition of Rosenberg's poetry and plays published by the Oxford University Press.