Isaac Rosenberg | Biography

Issac Rosenberg was killed in battle on 1 April 1918 while on patrol out of the trenches south of Arras on the Somme. His body, however, was never found. Three days before, he had written to Edward Marsh and enclosed the last poem he was ever to write. By the time it arrived Rosenberg was dead. In this last poem, "Through These Pale Cold Days," he expressed not only the familiar themes of the "trench poets," sterility and deadness, but a longing for peace and tranquillity, the deeper concerns that preoccupied his later poetry. The themes and subjects of Rosenberg's mature work clearly identify him as a war poet, and he has been compared to Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, and Julien Grenfell, but outside of their common experience of World War I, Rosenberg's life was as separate and distant from theirs as the English social and class system...
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